Otto Rühle

From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution

1924

Published: This translation was first published by Socialist Reproduction in
co-operation with Revolutionary Perspectives in 1974. The translation was made
from a German edition of the text published in 1970 by IPTR (Institut fur Praxis
und Theorie des Ratekomminismus, Berlin).Transcriber:For CommunismHTML-markup:Jonas Holmgren

This HTML version follows the Socialist Reproduction edition,
except that references to the AAUD-E have been standardised (in the Socialist
Reproduction edition it is also referred to as the AAU and AAUE), and references
to factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) and Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion),
have been indicated like this to make it clear that these are distinct forms of
organisation, and that the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) he discusses is
not the same as - indeed is in opposition to - Trades Unions.

The footnotes - with one exception - are taken from the Socialist
Reproduction edition and were added to the text by them to explain some of the
historical references.

In a brief historical summary are outlined the characteristic
traits of the bourgeois revolutions of Europe, which derive from the historic
task of these revolutions: to open the gates to capitalism as the new power in
society.

Because the Russian revolution appeared for a time with the
ambition of a social and proletarian revolution, while it was basically only a
belated and abortive bourgeois revolution, a special chapter is devoted to the
examination of its character.

Then the construction of the bourgeois state is described, as a
living illustration of the principles and primary forms of capitalist management
of the economy and organisation of economy. We get to know the authoritarian,
centralist, national state, and understand why it has to be as it is.

In connection with this we gain a proper understanding of
parliamentarism, which transplants the type of the bourgeois commercial
transaction into the legislation and finds in the parties the auxiliary organs
of bourgeois politics, which exist and function only in combination with it.

Akin to the parties, only without their pseudo-revolutionary
disguise, are the trade unions, purely opportunistic organs which chain the
proletariat to capital through a disastrous community of interests, instead of
liberating it from capital. As pre-revolutionary instruments of bourgeois
politics, parties and unions operate under the influence of a petty-bourgeois
inclined professional leadership in an unrevolutionary, counter-revolutionary
way. The demand to revolutionise the unions is shown up as a demagogic trick.

The course of the German revolution from 1918 was a school for
the proletariat in the knowledge that parties and unions are today the most
powerful obstacles to the proletarian revolution.

The proletariat must learn to take in hand itself the matter of
its liberation. It is beginning to grasp that the proletarian revolution is
primarily an economic phenomenon and that its preparation and unfolding has to
follow from the factories out. It is gaining the requisite energies and
qualifications through education to self-consciousness and self-reliance.

The organisation of the capitalist economy shapes the foundation
for the organisation of proletarian liberation. Struggle groups, workers' union
and councils system (Betreibs-Organisation, Arbeiter-Union and Ratesystem) are
the steps on the ascent to the achievement of power by the proletariat.

The proletarian revolution is in extent, content, tendency,
tactics of struggle and aim completely different from the bourgeois revolution.
It is the social revolution and finds its conclusion with the establishment of
leaderless, stateless authority-free socialism.

Under the dominion of the Roman Empire the economy had developed
in Italy almost to the threshold of capitalism. But the military and political
collapse of this world power meant at the same time - as result and cause in one
- the end of the economic development. What followed was reversion to earlier
primitive economic forms and centuries-long stagnation. Only the crusades
brought back the impulse to new development. Conceived as raids which were to
open up the orient with its treasures to the conquering pressure and avarice of
western freebooters and adventurers, they introduced for the following period a
chain of very successful trade connections, of which the North Italian states
became the bases. Via Venice, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, the merchandise found its
way on ancient army and trade routes to Nuremburg, Augsburg, Ulm, round from
there out to the north and north-west, especially to be transported towards
Flanders and Brabant. In connection with this grew up, in Italy first, an
indigenous production of goods, which provided for exchange of commodities; the
sudden impetus given to the money economy, led to the foundation of banks of
exchange and to the concentration of finance capital in the hands of a few
families. The springtime of modern capitalism set in.

Its full development was however interrupted and disturbed by the
advance of the Turks in the Near East and the discovery of the sea route to the
East Indies. The traffic with the orient was cut off; a total displacement of
the trade routes occurred. The bulk of the commodity exchange between east and
west shifted from Italy to Portugal. The Italian states became poor and
declined; their Renaissance culture perished; the attempts to attain national
unification on the basis of economic unity, through the chaos of the struggles
between patrician families and state republics, stopped in the early stages. As
no real bourgeoisie, which had learned to recognise itself as a class in the
modern sense, existed, it also stopped short of a centralised assertion of
capitalist interests on a large scale, short of any independent economic and
state establishment over the surrounding dependencies of aristocratic dynasties
and city guilds, short of a bourgeois revolution, which would have brought about
a fundamental break with the old order of things and set up a new economic and
social system.

In Portugal and Spain capitalism shot up like a hot-house plant
from the same soil, which was abundantly fertilised with the riches of newly
discovered continents opened up to boundless exploitation. But the favourable
economic situation found for itself no state power which would have developed
from its political task and would have grasped the essence of the capitalist
element. The Court, schooled and directed towards territorial
internationalisation as a result of marriage, inheritance and conquest, saw
itself, if it wished to safeguard its interests, bound to the sole international
power of its time, the Catholic Church. This in turn perceived in the state
power the surest defender of the faith, which was basically only the ideological
armoured shield for its economic interests, anchored in feudalism. Thus Emperor
and Pope, state power and church, were present in the Inquisition, which raged
against the heretics whose unbelief only formed the pretext for the method of
confiscation of goods, high fines, legalised robbery and systematic combat of
the awakening bourgeois class, bearer of a new economic principle. The movement
of the Comuneros, in which the self-consciousness of Castilian towns had risen
up, was smothered in blood; the hopeful blossoming of the textile industry ended
in the chaos of a crisis from which it never recovered; as representatives of
the early-capitalist epoch there remained behind only crowds of
lumpen-proletariat, who populated an impoverished country, ruined towns and
desolate wastelands. The strength of the bourgeois class, loaded suddenly with
riches which it dissipated, but just as suddenly pushed into the abyss of
poverty, had not found expression in a bourgeois revolution.

The maritime commerce which formed numerous bonds between south
and north had established in Bruges and later in Antwerp large depots for the
North and Baltic Sea shipping. Soon the Netherlands were interpenetrated with
capitalism, central to the entirety of European trade and the great reference
point of all nations. The bourgeoisie, grown prosperous and conscious of its
worth, held on to what it acquired and was determined to defend property and the
right of property under all circumstances and against every danger. This danger
came from Spain when Philip sent the dreaded Alba to the Netherlands in order to
secure the continuation of the Spanish crown by plundering the capitalist
riches. Under pressure of the danger, the Netherlands bourgeoisie welded itself
into the compact unity of a class capable of resistance.

The bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands had no aggressive
character. It is much more a heroic resistance struggle against an enemy power
invading from outside, more a national defence than a social confrontation. But
precisely in the awareness of common economic interests, in the alliance for
national action occasioned by it, consisted an important factor for the
consolidation of the forces whose sum total was capitalism. The bourgeois class
of the Netherlands triumphed over the might of the Spaniards because it stood on
the ground of a more developed and more viable economy - that's understood. But
as it triumphed, the combination into a new national community was accomplished,
and political freedom was proclaimed. The strong economic potency lived and
developed with national and political vigour.

The shower of sparks from the Netherlands revolution had set fire
to the decaying structure of the English feudal economy. The change to the
capitalist economic method proceeded very swiftly; trade spread its net over the
seas; domestic industry took up all the liberated energies of the impoverished
peasantry; big trading and industrial centres with depots, warehouses and
counting-houses, mills and banks, wharves and overseas companies were already
growing up. And in the parliament of estates, the bourgeois class won an
important position - after the other classes.

For the first time in world history the Parliament in England
became the arena for the fighting out of bourgeois-capitalist interests. Crown
and money-bag, royal power and burghers' will, exploded at each other in the
fiercest and most embittered quarrels. The king clung to prerogative and
privileges, monopolies and tax-raising, highest power of command and Divine
Right; the bourgeoisie with total energy and obstinacy stood up for freedom of
trade and competition, security of property and fruit of enterprise, free play
in energies, markets, profit. In order to break the reactionary power of the
crown, the Parliament under Cromwell organised an army which, after it had
destroyed the monarchy, at once set about securing private property through
suppression of the Levellers, and winning in Ireland and Scotland a greater
Britain for capital's need to expand. Even when the bourgeoisie, dependent on
the support of the military, could not prevent the return of the monarchy, it
divested it of all real power in affairs and questions of economic life and
reduced its existence to the luxury of a decorative accessory, which it could
accomplish nolens volens.[1]

In the English revolution was demonstrated the entire strength
and determination of the bourgeois class, already grown economically firmly
rooted and politically independent, which smashes old traditions as soon as they
become a hindrance to it, recognises no sentimentality, knows exactly what it
wants and shrinks back from no step which its interests order it to take.

The most spectacular of all bourgeois revolutions - the "Great
Revolution" - took place in France. It is without equal in its élan, its class
character and its historical import. The historiographers see in it the landmark
for the beginning of the modern period, of the bourgeois epoch proper.

A general-staff of the most outstanding minds had ideologically
prepared the revolution, which had become inevitable through the catastrophic
breakdown of the feudal system under Louis XIV and his successors. Montesquieu's
"L'Esprit des Lois" provided the building-stone for the foundation of the later
revolutionary constitutions; Rousseau in his "Social Contract" sketched the
picture of a new condition of society; the Encyclopaedists advocated with much
wit and fervour the "transformation of the general mode of thinking"; Voltaire
destroyed the prestige of traditional authorities and propagated the new
precepts of a natural morality; Sièyes established with cogent logic and
stirring eloquence the political claims of the 'Third Estate'. And while the
mass of petty bourgeois and workers did the rough work, while they stormed the
Bastille, marched to Versailles, seized the Tuileries and dragged the king to
the scaffold, the bourgeoisie, according to the intentions of their political
leaders and intellectual mentors, built up the edifice of a new state, which was
to become for them a comfortable residential palace; for the proletariat a hated
militarily-secured fortress. All attempts to obtain for those cheated of the
fruits of the revolution a voice within the new order were bloodily repulsed:
Marat, the Hebertists, Danton and finally Robespierre - the head of the Republic
of Virtue having become inconvenient - fell by the wayside. "The thieves have
won!" cried Robespierre on being arrested - in fact, the bourgeoisie, greedy for
booty, came into power. The petty bourgeoisie were burdened with taxation beyond
their means, the proletariat was refused the right of coalition. Freedom and
equality of franchise disappeared under the brutal fraud of the Two-Chamber
system. Baboeuf's desperate attempt to rescue the betrayed communism, even at
the eleventh hour, ended on the scaffold. Instead Napoleon sprang from the
bourgeoisie as the hero who was to bring them the garland of glory and material
success from the heavens. They were going to produce, sell, earn, conquer the
world market, rake in wealth. Capitalism was to triumph. Thus the Emperor
Bonaparte became the latest and essential executor of the will to power,
economically based and politically established, of the bourgeoisie.

The line of the bourgeois revolutions, which reached its high
point in France, took a sudden downward turn in the German Revolution of 1848.

The capitalist development begun in the Middle Ages, which had
received impetus and nourishment from the Eastern and Levantine trade of the
North Italian towns and had radiated its ideological reflections in the
Reformation, had slowly died away with the shifting of the trade routes and
finally expired completely. Feudalism had struck roots again; with the Peasants'
War and the Thirty Years' War the people had been so thoroughly bled that they
bore the yoke of blackest reaction for years with dumb submission. Around 1800
the dominant form of manufacturing was still petty handicrafts. Where capitalism
had gone over to production, it prolonged a miserable existence in domestic
industry or in state manufactures under the police baton of mercantile
regimentation. Not until Napoleon opened the eastern markets by force of arms to
the acquisitiveness of his capitalist bosses, but especially when he decreed the
continental blockade, did a current of fresh air enter the dull and narrow
Prussian-German servants' hall. Soon machines were clattering, factories grew
up, and in Rhineland, Saxony and Thuringia a great industry developed. The
bourgeoisie began to awaken as a class and to announce its political demands.
But seemingly everywhere crown and nobility as representatives of the feudal
system stood obstructing its path. The call for a constitution which would suit
the claims of the bourgeois class was answered by the Hohenzollerns with
persecution, treachery and provocative scorn. Finally, the February Revolution
in Paris in 1848 produced as a weak echo the German Revolution. The circumstance
that the definitive impulse for a rising against obsolete conditions and
privileges came from outside and found a bourgeoisie which, timid and
politically innocent, had not acquired the determination of a revolutionary
class, had as a consequence that the movement was not adequate to smashing the
existing bases of the state and creating a unified state with republican forms
in accordance with the interests of the ascending capitalist economy. The German
bourgeoisie, achieving meagre success, showed itself content with half freedoms,
lame concessions and rotten compromises. It abandoned the leadership of the
revolution to a clique of confused and rival ideologists, while the pillars of
the industrial development, frightened by the class goals vigorously placed on
the agenda by the French proletariat, quickly fled back into the wide-open arms
of the princely reaction. Indeed, when the June battle in Paris had shot down
the fighting proletariat and the reaction breathed freely again, to raise its
head more boldly than ever, in Germany even these meagre gains were again lost
by the bourgeoisie. Political ambitions were renounced, people contented
themselves with the business of profit-making and went on living in the old
servility.

In the end it was Bismarck who helped the bourgeoisie towards its
historic role by means of Prussian domestic power politics. On the way to a
German unified state under Prussian hegemony, which offered the rapidly growing
capitalism a large market and opened up new possibilities of development, he
knocked Austria out of the running as a political competitor in 1866; in
1870-71, France as an economic one. With the right to vote in the Reichstag, he
granted the bourgeoisie a political voice. At the head of the state he set a
half-absolute empire, a symbol for the compromise arrived at between feudal
power and bourgeoisie, crown and moneybag.

When Germany collapsed after four years of world war, the
bourgeoisie, massively strengthened in the meantime, in desperation found the
strength to make an abrupt end of the compromise which had become a danger to
its dominance and existence. In the choice between throne and bank-vaults, it
shortly decided with revolution for the latter; threw the Kaisers and Kings
overboard, set up the republic, gave itself a new constitution and completed -
with the active assistance of the working class organised in parties and trade
unions - the bourgeois revolution of 1848.

As the last in the line of the great bourgeois revolutions of
Europe, the Russian Revolution followed.

Russian feudalism, an economic colossus of bearlike primitiveness
and strength of resistance to which the tyranny of tsarism lent the political
form, had experienced through the war with Japan a shock that immediately set
free energies in which the need for political liberties and innovations of the
classes committed to the capitalist economic mode found its expression. The
desire of the bourgeoisie for a constitution was however at once extended and
strengthened through the demand of the industrial proletariat for minimum wages,
8-hour day, protection of labour; until now never recorded in the bourgeois
revolutions: the Russian Revolution had from the beginning a strong
proletarian-socialist strand. Certainly in earlier uprisings greater and smaller
sections of the working class had also joined in the struggle and shed blood:
but they had always been only appendages and following-troops of the bourgeois
class. Even in the German revolution of 1848 the March fighters in Berlin had
fallen as plain, mostly unknown workers, not as conscious proletarians and class
combatants. In Russia on the other hand the proletarians among the
social-democrats, cut off for the first time from the political part played by
the bourgeoisie, came on to the stage of history with their own revolutionary
demands and aims. Certainly the first phase, starting from the march of the
petitioning masses to the Winter Palace under the leadership of the priest
Gapon, until the decreeing of the October Manifesto, still took the typical
course of all bourgeois revolutions, which are concerned with liberal goals. But
already in the next phase the bourgeois-liberal voices - thin and timorous
enough given the Russian reaction's hardness of hearing - got lost in the
roaring gale of the mass demands of proletarian deprived of rights, and bloodily
tortured, impoverished and neglected peasants. Even if the strongly rooted
counter-revolution might succeed in snatching away again from the bourgeois
element the first parliamentary and legal concessions, and stifling the
revolutionary outcry of the masses with bloody executions and behind prison
walls, it still gained by that only a respite, but no rescue. Indeed, on the
contrary, the forcibly dammed-up strength of the revolution erupted, after three
years of world war loosened the chains, in an explosion of such power that the
whole system of tsarism was scattered like dust and left no more trace behind.
The thin voice of the Russian bourgeoisie was certainly aptly accompanied by a
weak energy: it was not capable of fulfilling its historical task. Then the
proletariat put its shoulder to the wheel and seized government power for
itself. It concluded peace, proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat and
set about causing the dancing star of socialism to rise out of the chaos of the
sinking world of tsarism.

If in 1917 the imperialism of the Russian bourgeoisie had
conquered, taken Constantinople and achieved all its war-aims, a bourgeois
liberal epoch on the English, French and German model would have been instituted
in Russia. But as it was, the world war had cut the ground from under the feet
not only of the old feudal despotism but also of every capitalist bourgeois
government that was at all on the cards. For foreign capital was chased out:
domestic capital, anyway only moderately developed, was destroyed. The fiasco of
Miliukov, Gutschkov, Kerensky[2] was therefore inevitable. In the end there
remained, to last out through everything to the conclusion of the war, only the
proletariat as bearer of the state power and executor of the people's will.

But the proletariat stood under the political leadership of
intellectuals who had been schooled in the spirit of west-European social
democracy. They were socialists and wanted socialism. Now the seizure of state
power in Russia seemed to them to offer the chance for the realisation of the
socialist idea.

The surrounding world was faced with a sensation: the Russian
Revolution, recently still an overdue, feeble bourgeois revolution, turned in an
instant into a proletarian revolution. Beginning and end of the bourgeois
revolution came together in one.

It is the historical task of the bourgeois revolution to overcome
the absolutism of the feudal era and to procure for capitalism, as the new
economic system, legal recognition and social acceptance in the framework of the
bourgeois-liberal state order.

In all countries with a formerly feudal economy and absolutist
form of government the bourgeois revolution has fulfilled this task.

It never had the aim and function of infringing or even
suspending the principle of the economic basis and the social order dependent on
it, that is private property in the means of production. It only changed, for
the time being, the class which exercised authority over the whole as the
representative of this principle.

While in the feudal epoch the nobility forms this class,
supported fundamentally by private property, holding dominion in the
despotically administered patriarchal state, organised by estates with the
monarch at its head, in the capitalist era the bourgeoisie - as private
possessor of goods and money - takes over the government, which is established
in the constitutional state with Parliament and Cabinet, at its most ideal in
the form of the parliamentary republic.

The bourgeois revolution, everywhere it has manifested itself,
brought the bourgeois class to the fore. This class was more or less conscious
of its historical mission. It had also prepared the revolutionary movement, at
least economically, often ideologically too. Under the pressure of unavoidable
necessities resulting from the conflict of the old and new tendencies, it had
finally become the leader of the revolutionary action and had won political
power, in order to use it immediately after the victory for the erection of the
bourgeois state and social order.

The success alone of the revolution, which consists in the
creation of the capitalist economic order and the social order appropriate to
it, determines its nature as a bourgeois revolution. The circumstances that
proletarian strata also form a part, now smaller, now greater, of the
revolutionary fighters, does not come into consideration in determining the
historical nature of the revolution. Even when the proletariat is already formed
as a class and marches in the revolution with its own political class aims -
perhaps indeed influences its development considerably or even controls it -
nothing of the historical nature of the revolution is changed. The weak or
strong proletarian admixture in a bourgeois revolution can slow down or
accelerate, sometimes deflect or disturb, its completion; can temporarily
obliterate or deform its face; can affect or sometimes endanger its success, but
to the essence of the revolution, its socio-economic content, it can make no
difference. Likewise in the bourgeois state and in the army the workers form the
strongest contingent, they make up a large class grouping - and yet no one will
be tempted on this account to call the bourgeois state proletarian or to speak
of a proletarian army. Even the Red Army of Soviet Russia, consisting solely of
peasants and workers, is a military machine constructed on a bourgeois model and
functioning according to the laws of bourgeois state policy, which only
political demagogy, with the intention to deceive, can describe as a
'proletarian' army.

Where and whenever proletarian strata play a role in the
bourgeois revolution, they always appear in the train of the bourgeois class,
partly as paid mercenaries, partly as fellow-travellers, partly as political
auxiliaries of uncertain tendency. They often form the rump, mostly the tail of
the movement, never the head. The last is always with the merchants, bankers,
professional politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, literati. Here the demands are
formulated, the programme developed, the goals fixed, the statements given out.
Here bourgeois policy is made. The historical face of the revolution receives
its imprint from here outwards.

In the first bourgeois revolutions the proletariat could not yet
figure at all as a class because up till then it was not developed as such. At
first in England it began to mark itself off as a class from the main body of
the bourgeoisie, combined in strong organisations. But it was still always
closely intermingled with petty-bourgeois elements and its programmes never went
beyond the radicalism of these sections. Thus the Levellers marched beside the
left Puritan sects at the very front of the revolutionary forces, yet their
whole attitude to the revolutionary problem stayed bound up with the ideology of
their time, which was at best bourgeois. The pivot of all bourgeois orientation
is: that private property remains protected. To the extent that radical groups
and sects transgressed this, it arose out of a wrongly understood primitive
Christianity, whose postulates, too literally interpreted, would have been
condemned to be shattered with the very first attempts at realisation, because
all the conditions of the socio-economic milieu were against them. Likewise in
the French Revolution the proletariat was not present as a class: the extent of
the development of the bourgeois class did not give rise to it at all. Not even
sixty years later, in the French as in the German revolution, did a proletarian
segment come to light. Only half a generation later did Lasalle's agitation work
begin, with the aim of preparing, through the awakening of class feeling among
the proletariat the general education towards class consciousness.

From the beginning, the Russian Revolution - in accordance with
its historical conditions - could only be a bourgeois revolution. It had to get
rid of tsarism, to smooth the way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie in
to the saddle politically.

Through an unusual chain of circumstances the bourgeoisie found
itself in no position to play its historical role. The proletariat, leaping on
to the stage in its place, did make itself in a moment master of the situation
by an unprecedented exertion of energy, daring, tactical readiness and
intelligence, but fell in the following period into a fatal predicament.

According to the phaseological pattern of development as
formulated and advocated by Marx, after feudal tsarism in Russia there had to
come the capitalist bourgeois state, whose creator and representative is the
bourgeois class.

But government power from 1917 was occupied not by bourgeois, but
by proletarians who repudiated the bourgeois state and were ready to institute a
new economic and social order following socialist theory.

Between feudalism and socialism yawned a gap of a full hundred
years, through which the system of the bourgeois epoch fell unborn and unused.

The Bolsheviks undertook no more and no less than to jump a whole
phase of development in Russia in one bold leap.

Even if one admits that in doing so they reckoned on the world
revolution which was to come to their aid and compensate for the vacuum in
development within by support from the great fund of culture from outside, this
calculation was still rashness because it based itself solely on a vague hope.
Rash too was the experiment arising from this calculation.

The first act of the Bolshevik regime was the Peace of
Brest-Litovsk. But this treaty, concluded with an advanced capitalist bourgeois
government, was an act of bourgeois politics. A really proletarian revolution
would have maintained a hostile attitude, would have tied up the German fighting
strength further, to thwart German imperialism of victory in the west, and on
its part would have mobilised all forces for the furthering of the world
revolution. Rosa Luxemburg gave the sharpest expression to this view in her
time.

In connection with the treaty, the Bolsheviks declared themselves
for the right to self-determination of nations on the basis of which ensued the
severing of Finland, Poland, the Baltic, the Ukraine and the Caucasus from
Russia. This statement was the outcome of bourgeois political orientation. The
result was on the one hand the Russian national state - which is not a
proletarian goal - and on the other the collapse of the proletarian revolution
in the detached states. A proletarian revolution would have had to establish
solidarity over all frontier posts and beyond national turnpikes.

The Bolsheviks, however, began the greatest fall from grace with
the distribution of the big estates to the peasants. Through this the peasants
obtained private property. But socialism should begin not with the introduction
but with the elimination of private property. And so the measure was a slap in
the face of the socialist idea. As obvious as this act would have been for the
government of a bourgeois state power (more or less as at the time of the French
Revolution), it is similarly inadmissible - in fact, grotesque - as an
expression of proletarian policy. For, with the peasantry having attained
private property, about 85% of the population of Russia was thereby recruited to
enmity against socialism.

The consequence of this policy is manifest in the irreconcilable
opposition between country and town, peasantry and industrial proletariat. It
led to the boycott of the towns, to the refusing of food, to the sabotage of the
state supply organisations: it compels tactics of concessions to the
capitalist-orientated peasantry - a policy directed towards peasant interests
and a capitulation to profit.

In fact the Bolshevik regime had to go this way. While it still
based itself in 1918 on the landless, and the poor peasants with the industrial
workers made up its surest following, it now sides with the property owning
peasants, creates tenant farmers and big proprietors, sets the grain trade free,
permits and encourages in this way the rise of a peasantry with capitalist
interests, whose political business it takes care of.

Parallel to this, in the same bourgeois tracks, ran the economic
policy vis-à-vis industry. The Bolsheviks carried out the nationalisation of
industry, of transport, banks, factories, etc., and thus awoke quite generally
the belief that socialist measures were involved here. Nevertheless,
nationalisation is not socialisation. Through nationalisation you can arrive at
a large-scale, tightly centrally-run state capitalism, which may exhibit various
advantages as against private capitalism. Only it is still capitalism. And
however you twist and turn it gives no way of escape from the constraint of
bourgeois politics. So also in Russia, then, they came to make great concession
to foreign capitalists, to whom mineral wealth and labour power have been handed
over for exploitation - profit-sharing with the state. The stock exchange is
open again. A host of dealers, entrepreneurs, agents, brokers, bankers,
profiteers, speculators and jobbers has turned up again and settled in. By the
decree of 27 May 1921 the right of possession over factories and workshops,
industrial and trading establishments, instruments and means of production,
agricultural and industrial produce, financial stock; the right to inventions,
copyright, trade marks; the right to take up mortgages or lend money, like the
testamentary or legal right of succession, was expressly acknowledged again.
With this the bourgeois order is established in its entirety and in all
essential components.

To this also belongs, besides the bourgeois jurisdiction whose
organisational structure is being constructed, the Red Army: a thoroughly
bourgeois army functioning in accordance with bourgeois-capitalist interests. In
the context of policies dictated in the first instance by the protection of the
agrarian profits, it represents the sharpest weapon of basic defence - first
against the Cossacks, Denikin, Wrangel[3] and so on, but sooner or later also
against the demands of the proletarian socialist revolution.

Not last is a striking expression of bourgeois politics, the
dictatorship of the Communist Party leaders set up in Russia, which is falsely
described as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Behind this
pseudo-revolutionary protective screen hides, as everyone knows, the omnipotence
of a small handful of people who are the commanders of the authoritarian,
centrally organised commissariat-bureaucracy. As inverted tsarism this party
dictatorship is a completely bourgeois concern.

These few contentions show and prove that the Russian regime,
contrary to its doubtless honest intention to pursue proletarian socialist
policy, has been pushed step by step by the power of facts into bourgeois
capitalist policy.

Even where they succeeded for a while in developing the shoots of
a social revolution and creating the beginnings of an economic and social order
of a socialist nature, the pains they took ended finally with a failure, so that
they were forced to demolish the attempts and experiments.

And as the best and most honourable of the fighters for a social
revolution opposed this, the Bolshevik authorities did not shrink for a minute
from throwing them by hundreds and thousands into prisons - quite in the
bourgeois-capitalist-tsarist manner - sending them to Siberia, or condemning
them to death. A Trotsky played the executioner of the Kronstadt sailors with
the same cold-bloodedness as a Gallifet[4] having French revolutionaries, or a
Noske[5] German revolutionaries slaughtered.

It was an historical error to believe that the Russian Revolution
was the start of a social revolution. And it amounts to a demagogic fraud to
awaken and maintain this belief in the heads of workers.

When the socialists in the Russian government, after the victory
over tsarism, imagined that a phase of historical development could be skipped
and socialism structurally realised, they had forgotten the ABC of Marxist
knowledge according to which socialism can only be the outcome of an organic
development which has capitalism developed to the limits of its maturity as its
indispensable presupposition. They had to pay for this forgetfulness by a wide,
troublesome and victim-strewn detour which brings them in a space of time to
capitalism.

To institute capitalism and to organise the bourgeois state is
the historical function of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian Revolution was
and is a bourgeois revolution, no more and no less: the strong socialist
admixture changes nothing in this essence. So it will fulfil its task by
throwing away, sooner or later, the last remnants of its "War-Communism" and
revealing the face of a real, genuine capitalism. The struggles within the
Bolshevik party are preparing this conclusion, and with it the end of the
Bolshevik party dictatorship. The line of development - whether that of a party
coalition which hastens and alleviates the launching phase of capitalism, or
that of a Bonaparte who protracts and aggravates it - is not yet clear; both are
possible.

The bourgeois economic order rests on the possession of capital,
the production of commodities, the exploitation of wage-workers and the gaining
of profit.

The bourgeois state is the organisation of public and legal
authority into a mechanism of domination, which ensures the functioning and the
success of the bourgeois economic order.

All forces and means, in materials as in ideas, that the state
has at its disposal stand directly or indirectly at the service of capital. The
authority to order the state power lies in the hands of the bourgeois class. It
receives the directives for the use of the state authority from economic
necessities. In the interest of the highest expediency in its use, the
organisation of the state has followed in accordance with these economic
necessities.

In the capitalist economy the capitalist is master of the process
of production. He buys the raw materials, owns the means of production, decides
the managing of production, sells the commodities, reaps the profit. He builds
the factories, seeks out the markets, takes care of the customers, regulates the
circulation of money, pays out the wage. He is commander, representative,
supreme court. He has money. He is authority.

As in the economy, so in the state. The capitalist demands
liberties which the feudal state refuses him: freedom of trade, freedom of
occupation, freedom of competition. He needs freedom of movement, liberation
from feudal charges and guild barriers, the right to self-determination, the
right of personality. He demands the guaranteeing of his title of ownership, the
legal protection of the exploitation process, the legitimising of profit, the
social sanctioning of his authority.

In the state-scientific theory of liberalism are set down all the
points and principles according to which the capitalist bourgeois wants to see
his state, the bourgeois-capitalist state, organised. All the liberal demands
and goals, aimed at obtaining and securing for capitalism the fullest freedom
for its development, are here woven into a system. The philosophical anchorage
of this system is given in individualism as it has been founded, formulated and
completed in England by Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume; in France by Bayle, Voltaire,
Helvetius, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists; in Germany by Leibnitz, Lessing,
Fichte. Begun as 'Enlightenment', this philosophical school came to dominate the
political and social provinces first in England, where after the Revolution the
track had been cleared for the unfettered development of bourgeois-materialist
interests, and finally found its formulation and strongest emphasis in the
principle of Manchester liberalism, "Laissez faire, laissez aller". The whole
atmosphere of the great French Revolution is dominated by the spirit of
bourgeois individualism, where its manifestation resulted in the boldest
gestures and most vigorous exaltations as an answer to the heavy pressure of the
old state and ecclesiastical situation. In Germany, whose bourgeois class
distinguished itself from the beginning by lack of imagination and calculating
cowardice, the philosophical thought-content of individualism faded very quickly
to an empty egoism, which enjoyed a predominantly materialist life. The
bourgeois class also produced no statesmen from its ranks who would have taken
care of its business: it entrusted its interests to the Junker Bismarck[6] who -
according to his own words - saw it as his task to cultivate millionaires. These
millionaires symbolise bourgeois-capitalist authority.

Thus the bourgeois class, as soon as it has first won power over
feudalism, arrives at a state order according to its needs, in its interests,
for its use. Its wishes are decisive, its attitude determines. For it is
authority. Its state is an authoritarian state.

In the capitalist economy all commodities develop the tendency to
follow the market in order to be exchanged there. This market can be a shop, a
department store, an annual market, a fair or the world market. The market is
the point to which the centripetal force of all commodities tends. It is,
however, also the point from which the centrifugal force of all commodities
pushes apart again as soon as they are exchanged, i.e. fulfilled their
capitalist purpose. If the commodity is money, the market is stock exchange or
bank. Always the market stands at the middle point of a process working in two
directions. The market is the centre.

To the law of motion of the capitalist economy corresponds that
of the bourgeois state. All the forces of the government collect at one point,
there receive their orders and then act back centrifugally. The bureaucracy
escalates up to its highest peak, the minister; the army organisation up to the
generalissimo; there the decision is taken, the command given, the decree
proclaimed; and with the precision of a mechanical apparatus, the organisation
functions according to the will of one head, the centre, down to its last errand
boy and lowest organ. Only the central office is autonomous: it is the brain and
thinks for the whole. Its decision is definitive, it is to be obeyed
unconditionally. Strict order and discipline prevail.

In the feudal era, when every socage-farm[7] with its copyholders
formed a small economic unit, more or less self-contained and self-supporting,
the individual's power to give orders did not have much scope. One was situated
beside the other and each was to the same extent his own master. The system of
organisation in which every part of the whole enjoys its full autonomy is called
federalism. The feudal state, then, had been a federal state.

The bourgeoisie had gained from the conditions of its capitalist
economy the insight that centralism was in many respects superior to federalism.
Especially insofar as it united all the dispersed and isolated forces into a
whole. They came out in favour of a centralised will and therewith won the
ability to do great things. When the capitalist brought the hand-workers
together in the factory, went over from domestic industry to co-operation,
finally evolved this into manufacture, he went through practical schools of
centralism. All the experiences and knowledge thus gained the bourgeois class
now utilised in establishing its state structure. It needed a large centralised
mechanism that obeyed every finger-touch at the highest point. A mechanism with
which it, the small minority, could be the brain, issuing commands,
accomplishing its will. And with which the large mass, the proletariat, was
subjected to its dominance through strict order and discipline. This mechanism
was provided by the centralist system of organisation. It made possible in the
best and surest way the domination of few over many. So the bourgeoisie created
its state for itself as a centralised state.

In the capitalist economy the production of commodities soon
becomes mass production. But the absorption capacity of the existing market is
quickly sated. New, bigger selling outlets become necessary. Capitalism develops
a drive to expand, which threatens to burst the boundaries of the state. Thus
every young capitalist state seeks, through wars, conquest, colonial
acquisitions, etc., to become a bigger state. This requires a certain mental and
spiritual preparation and influencing of the citizens - a certain ideology which
interprets the pressure towards expansion and extension in the interest of
profit as the expression of imaginary forces and needs, and lyingly converts
warlike conquests into achievements for the common good. This ideology invents
the concept nation, exploits sentiments about home and fatherland and misuses
them for class-interested purposes of enrichment. It deals in national
interests, national honour, national duties and national responsibility, until
it gets involved in the national war, which is falsified into a war of national
defence. To wage the war a national army has been provided, the schools have
been made into abodes of national incitement; in national politics a special
national phraseology has been cultivated which furnishes every war, however
notoriously for plunder and conquest, with the requisite intellectual and moral
justification. When the SPD defended the world war from 1914 to 1918 as a
national war, when the KPD, during the collapse of the Ruhr, joined in
supporting the national defence of the Ruhr zone alongside Schlageter, then both
parties proved their character as national auxiliary organs of the bourgeois
state, which is always a national state.[8]

The capitalist economy, once it has entered the arena of
large-scale enterprises and beyond that, the formation of stock companies, has
created for itself a complicated apparatus of management, very appropriate for
its requirements. In it all forces are well weighed up against each other, all
functions cleverly distributed, all individual actions bound into an exact
collective action. The technology of the machine is its model.

In broad outline, the management structure of a modern large
factory looks like this: nominal owners and with them actual interested parties,
and so the real beneficiaries of the capitalist large-scale concern are the
shareholders. These come together in the shareholders' meeting which passes
important resolutions, exercises control, calls in reports, relieves and
appoints officials, and concedes wages. From the shareholders' meeting issues
the board of directors, which supervises the management, comes to final
decisions, constitutes the supreme court in all the vital questions of the
works, but is still responsible vis-à-vis the shareholders' meeting.

An image of this large-scale industry's machinery is the
bourgeois state. There the bearers of a mandate from the electorate sit in the
parliament, a large meeting of shareholders entitled to vote who, discussing and
resolving, equipped with important powers, decide about the weal and woe of the
state as a whole. From its midst issues the board of directors, the Cabinet,
which has the task of looking after, with special care and heightened vigilance,
the interests served by the functioning of the state machinery. The Cabinet
members (ministers) represent the state at its highest point; they supervise the
work of the management bureaucracy placed under them, make the big contacts
within the competing firms abroad, i.e. the capitalist foreign states, but
always they stay dependent on Parliament and responsible to it; by it they are
appointed and recalled.

As in the assembly of shareholders, so too in Parliament
questions and proposals often manage to be carried through and dismissed which
already are foregone conclusions and are only put to the vote for form's sake.
They have already been put forward and decided on in another place, whose
importance more or less strongly controls the vote of the shareholders' meeting
or the parliament. This other place is identical with the offices of the great
banks or of the captains of industry. Here, where the most significant decisions
of the capitalist economy come down, the decisive resolutions of bourgeois
politics are passed. And indeed by the same people in the same case. For
politics is nothing other than struggle for the legal protection of economic
interests - is the defence of profit with the weapons of paragraphs in law, the
securing of the capitalist system of exploitation with the means of state
authority.

With tirelessness and zeal the bourgeoisie has worked at the
construction of its state form and at the development of its legislature. For
this it found its most reliable tool in Parliament, which in turn found its
auxiliary organs in the parties. Today, having reached the highest peak of
capitalist development, big capital feels the power of Parliament and parties as
burdensome. It avoids it by Enabling Acts[9], military dictatorship, and
shifting important authority and decisions to other bodies in which the
representatives of capital and economic concerns have the upper hand (state
economic council). Open antagonism towards Parliament and parliamentarism is no
longer at all concealed in big-capitalist circles; in fact attacks directed
against parliament and parliamentary government are debated quite openly without
inhibition. The slave, Parliament, has done his duty. When the idea of a
Directory was being discussed in the bonapartist tendency, Herr Minoux was
selected as the supreme holder of power. Herr Minoux the General Director of
Stinnes.[10]

The character, content and results of laws always correspond to
the dominant economic interests of a given time, more specifically to the
definitive economic interests of the ruling class. In the bourgeois epoch this
class is the bourgeoisie. Parliament therefore had the task of revising old laws
according to the needs of the bourgeoisie or abrogating them in favour of new
laws suited to the problems of the time.

As early as the last period of the feudal epoch, a kind of
parliament had already existed: the convocation of Estates. In the struggle with
the estates - first the nobility, later especially the world of finance and
trade, to whose material aid he had to turn - the prince had drawn or selected
representatives of the different orders and occupations and convened them in a
corporate body. But this body was only to express wishes, make suggestions,
furnish opinions: this meeting of estates was not competent to enact and
promulgate laws itself. Eventually a second body partly joined the assembly of
estates, coming more from the people and even sometimes elected, so that a
distinction was drawn between a first and second chamber (Lords and Commons).
But the competences of both chambers were still very limited by the power of the
princes. Real parliaments with full legislative power, proceeding from open
election, everywhere formed one of the achievements of the bourgeois revolution.

As we know, the bourgeois class stood for the principle of
liberalism in its state-political ideology and the principle of democracy in its
state-political organisation. It was, then, for freedom and equality. But only
for freedom as it saw it, namely as far as it regarded the interests of its
economy of profit, and for equality only insofar as it could be expressed in
paragraphs on paper, not to be confirmed and realised through equality of social
conditions. Not even in dreams did it occur to them to respect and practice
freedom and equality in relation to the proletariat, still less did they let the
principle of brotherhood carry any weight for it.

At the same time, bourgeois society is by no means a monolithic
class. Rather it contains many layers, groups and professional categories, and
therefore a lot of different economic interests. The wholesaler has different
interests from the retailer, the house-owner from the tenant, the tradesman from
the farmer, the buyer from the seller. But all the different groups and
categories want to and ought to be taken into account in the legislature. Each
has more prospect of consideration the larger the total of representatives of
its interests in parliament. On this account every layer or group tried to
collect as many votes as possible for its candidates in parliamentary elections.
To make their agitation vigorous and lasting, they combined in election
associations from which the parties emerged with firmer organisations and more
definite programmes. Whatever these parties called themselves, whichever
programmes they put forward, whatever high and holy virtues they stood up for,
whatever fine phrases and slogans they used - their struggle, to the extent that
it strove for political influence, was always concerned with quite definite
economic interests. Thus the conservative party, which wanted the preservation
(i.e. conservation) of the old traditional state form, distribution of power,
and ideology, formed the rallying point for the feudal caste of big landowners.
The big industrialists with an interest in the national state, who embraced the
liberalism of the capitalist era, formed the party of the national liberals. The
petty bourgeois, to whom freedom of opinion and equality before the law seemed
achievements worth striving and being thankful for, were found in the democratic
and radical parties.

At first the workers had no party of their own, for they had not
yet grasped that they were a class on their own with their own interests and
political aims. So they let themselves be taken in by the democrats and
liberals, or even the conservatives, and formed the faithful herd of voters for
the bourgeois parties. In proportion, however, as the workers' class
consciousness was jolted awake and strengthened, they went over to forming their
own parties and sending their own representatives to parliament, with the
mission of securing for the working class as many and as large advantages as
possible during the construction and completion of the bourgeois state. Thus, in
the Erfurt Programme[11] of the Social-Democratic Party, the many practical
demands of the movement are laid down alongside the great, revolutionary final
goal, reflecting its parliamentary life and orientation towards the immediate
present. These demands had nothing to do with socialism, but derived mainly from
bourgeois programmes; only they were never carried out by bourgeois parties, in
fact had never been seriously wanted. It is not to be denied that the
representatives of social democracy did hard and sincere work in parliament. But
their effectiveness and success remained limited. For parliament is an
instrument of bourgeois politics, tied to the bourgeois method of making
politics, and bourgeois too in its effect. In the last analysis, the real
advantage of parliamentarism accrues to the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois, i.e. parliamentary method of carrying on politics
is closely related to the bourgeois method of carrying on economics. The method
is: trade and negotiate. As the bourgeois trades and negotiates goods and values
in his life and office, at market and fair, in bank and stock exchange, so in
parliament too he trades and negotiates the legislative sanctions and legal
means for the money and material values negotiated. In parliament the
representatives of each party try to extract as much as possible from the
legislature for their customers, their interest group, their 'firm'. They are
also in constant communication with their producers' combines, employers'
associations cartels, special interest associations or trade unions, receiving
from them directions, information, rules of behaviour or mandates. They are the
agents, the delegates, and the business is done through speeches, bargains,
haggling, dealing, deception, voting manoeuvres, compromises. The main work of
parliament, then, is not even done in the large parliamentary negotiations,
which are only a sort of spectacle, but in the committees which meet privately
and without the mask of the conventional lie.

In the pre-revolutionary period, parliament also had its
justification for the working class in that it was the means of securing for it
such political and economic advantages as the power relations of any given
moment allowed. But this justification was null and void the instant that the
proletariat arose as a revolutionary class and advanced its claims to take over
the entire state and economic power. Now there was no more negotiation, no
putting up with greater or lesser advantages, no compromises - now it was all or
nothing. The first revolutionary achievement of the proletariat would logically
have had to be the abolition of parliament. But it could not fulfil this
achievement because it was itself still organised in parties, and so bound up
with organisations of a basically bourgeois character and consequently incapable
of transcending bourgeois nature, i.e. bourgeois politics, economy, state order
and ideology. A party needs parliamentarism, as parliament needs parties. One
conditions the other, in mutual sustenance and support. The maintenance of the
party means maintenance of parliament and with it the maintenance of bourgeois
power.

After the model of the bourgeois state and its institutions, the
party too is organised on authoritarian centralist principles. All movement in
it goes in the form of commands from the top of the central committee down to
the broad base of the membership. Below, the mass of the members; above, the
ranks of officials at local, regional, country and national level. The party
secretaries are the NCOs, the MPs, the officers. They give the orders, issue the
watchwords, make policy, are the higher dignitaries. The party apparatus, in the
form of offices, newspapers, funds, mandates, gives them power to prescribe for
the mass of members, which none of the latter can avoid. The officials of the
central committee are, so to speak, the party Ministers; they issue decrees and
instructions, interpret the decisions of party congresses and conferences,
determine the use of money, distribute posts and offices according to their
personal policy. Certainly the party conference is supposed to be the supreme
court, but its composition, sitting, decision-taking and interpretation of its
decisions are thoroughly in the hands of the highest holders of power in the
party, and the zombie-like obedience typical of centralism takes care of the
necessary echoes of subordination.

The concept of a party with a revolutionary character in the
proletarian sense is nonsense. It can only have a revolutionary character in the
bourgeois sense, and then only during the transition between feudalism and
capitalism. In other words, in the interest of the bourgeoisie. During the
transition between capitalism and socialism, it must fail, the more so in
proportion to how revolutionary had been its expression in theory and
phraseology. When the world war broke out in 1914, i.e. when the bourgeoisie of
the whole world declared war on the proletariat of the whole world, the Social
Democratic Party should have replied with the revolution of the proletariat of
the whole world against the bourgeoisie of the whole world. But it failed, threw
away the mask of world revolution, and followed bourgeois policy all along the
line. The USP should have issued the call to revolution when the peace treaty of
Versailles was concluded. Its bourgeois nature, however, forced it to a western
instead of eastern orientation; it agitated for signing and submitting. Even the
KPD, hyper-radical as its pose is, on every critical question is constrained by
its bourgeois-centralist authoritarian character to serve the bourgeois
politicians as soon as it comes to the crunch. It sits in parliament and carried
on bourgeois politics; in the Ruhr in 1920 it negotiated with the bourgeois
military[12]; it fought on the side of Stinnes in the Ruhr action against France
by means of passive resistance; it falls victim to the cult of bourgeois
nationalism and fraternises with fascists; it pushes itself into bourgeois
governments in order to help further Russia's policy of capitalist construction
from there. Everywhere - bourgeois politics carried out with typically bourgeois
means. When the SPD says it does not want a revolution, there is a certain logic
in this because it, as a party, can never carry out a proletarian revolution.
But when the KPD says it wants the revolution, then it takes into its programme
far more than it is capable of performing, whether in ignorance of its bourgeois
character or out of fraudulent demagogy.

Every bourgeois organisation is basically an administrative
organisation which requires a bureaucracy in order to function. So is the party,
dependent on the administrative machine served by a paid professional
leadership. The leaders are administrative officials and as such belong to a
bourgeois category. Leaders, i.e. officials, are petty bourgeois, not
proletarians.

Most party and trade union leaders were once workers, perhaps the
most sound and revolutionary. But as they became officials, i.e. leaders, agents
and makers of business, they learned to trade and negotiate, to handle documents
and cash; they undertook mandates, began to operate within the great bourgeois
organism with the aid of their organisational apparatus. To whom God gives
office, he also gives understanding. Anyone who is leader in a bourgeois
organisation, including parties and trade unions, does so not on the strength of
his intellectual qualifications, his insight and excellence, his courage and
character, but he is leader on the strength of the organisational apparatus,
which is in his hands, at his disposal, endowing him with competence. He owes
his leadership role to the authority arising from the position he occupies in
the organisational mechanism. Thus the party secretary obtains his power from
the office in which all the threads of the administration converge, from the
paper work of which he alone has exact knowledge; the editor obtains his from
the newspaper which he has in his intellectual power and uses as his instrument;
the treasurer from the funds he manages; the MP from the mandate which gives him
an inside view of the apparatus of government denied to ordinary mortals. An
official of the central leadership may be much more limited and mediocre than an
under-official, and yet his influence and power are greater, exactly as an NCO
can be smarter than a Colonel or General without having the great authority of
these officers. Ebert[13] is certainly not the ablest mind in his party, yet it
has installed him in the highest office it has to give; he is certainly not the
ablest mind in the government either - but why does he occupy that position? Not
on the basis of his personal qualifications but as the random representative of
his party, a centralist, authoritarian organisation, in which he has climbed to
the highest rung of the ladder. And why does the bourgeoisie put up with this
Ebert? Because the bourgeois method of his politics has brought him to this
position and because he conducts himself politically throughout as the advocate
and counsel of these bourgeois politics. A bourgeois leader in this position
would be neither better nor worse than he.

Here a word must be said about leadership in general.

There will no doubt always be people who in their knowledge,
their experiences, their ability, their character are superior to others whom
they will influence, advise, stimulate in struggle, carry away with them, lead.
And so there will always be leaders in this sense. A good thing too, for
cleverness, integrity of character and ability should dominate, not stupidity,
coarseness and weakness. Anyone who, in his rejection of the paid professional
leadership that gets its authority from the organisational apparatus, goes so
far as to repudiate all and every leadership without considering that
superiority of mind and character is a quality of leadership not to be
repudiated but worthy of welcome, oversteps the mark and becomes a demagogue.
That goes too for those who inveigh and rage against the intellectuals in the
movement, or - as has occurred - even against knowledge. Naturally bourgeois
knowledge is always suspect and usually questionable, bourgeois intellectuals
are always an abomination in the workers' movement, which they misuse, lead
astray, and often enough betray to the bourgeoisie. But the achievements of
bourgeois learning can be re-cast for the working class and forged into weapons,
exactly as the capitalist machines will one day perform useful services for the
working class. And when intellectuals in the interest of the proletariat attend
to the important process of the scientific assimilation and reworking of
intellectual works, they deserve recognition and thanks for it, not abuse and
inculpation. In conclusion, Marx, Bakunin, Rosa Luxemburg and others were
intellectuals, whose scientific labours have rendered the most valuable services
to the liberation struggle of the proletariat.

The paid professional leaders of the bourgeois organisations
deserve mistrust and are to be rejected as agents of a bourgeois administrative
apparatus. Their bourgeois activity generates in them bourgeois living habits
and a bourgeois style of thinking and feeling. Inevitably they take on the
typical petty-bourgeois leadership ideology of the party and trade union
apparatchiks. The secure appointment, the heightened social position, the
punctually paid salary, the well-heated office, the quickly learnt routine in
the carrying out of formal administrative business, engender a mentality which
makes the labour official in no way distinguishable from the petty post, tax,
community or state official as much in his work as in his domestic milieu. The
official is for correct management of business, painstaking orderliness, smooth
discharging of obligations; he hates disturbances, friction, conflicts. Nothing
is so repugnant to him as chaos, therefore he opposes any sort of disorder; he
combats the initiative and independence of the masses; he fears the revolution.

But the revolution comes. Suddenly it is there, rearing up.
Everything is convulsed, everything turned upside down. The workers are in the
streets, pressing for action. They set themselves to casting down the
bourgeoisie, destroying the state, taking possession of the economy. Then a
monstrous fear seizes the officials. For God's sake, is order to be transformed
into disorder, peace into unrest, the correct management of business into chaos?
Not that! Thus 'Vorwärts'[14] on 8 November 1918 warned of "agitators with no
conscience" who "had fantasies of revolution"; thus the newsletter of the trade
unions combated the "irresponsible adventurers" and "putschists"; thus the
parliamentary party sent Scheidemann[15] even at the last minute into the
Wilhelmite Cabinet[16], so that "the greatest misfortune - the revolution -
might be avoided." And during the revolution, wherever workers wanted to go into
action they were eagerly countered every time by party and trade union officials
with the call: "Not too violent! No bloodshed! Be reasonable! Let us negotiate!"

As negotiations were resorted to, instead of grabbing the enemy
and throwing him to the ground, the bourgeoisie was saved. Negotiation is after
all their method of carrying on politics, and on their fighting terrain they are
at their most secure. Wanting to carry on proletarian politics in the home of
the bourgeoisie and with their methods means sitting down at the capitalists'
table, eating and drinking with them, and betraying the interests of the
proletariat. Treachery to the masses - from the SPD to the most extreme of the
KPD - need not arise from base intention; it is simply the consequence of the
bourgeois nature of every party and trade union organisation. The leaders of
these parties and trade unions are in fact spiritually part of the bourgeois
class, physically part of bourgeois society.

But bourgeois society is collapsing. It is more and more falling
victim to ruin and decay. Its legislature is ridiculed and despised by the
bourgeoisie itself. Laws on interest rates and currency are promulgated, and
no-one gives a damn. Everything that not long ago was regarded as sacred -
church, morality, marriage, school, public opinion - is exposed, soiled, made
mock of, distorted into caricature. In such a time the party, too, cannot go on
existing any longer; as a limb of bourgeois society it will go down with it.
Only a quack would try to preserve the hand from death when the body lies dying.
Hence the unending chain of party splits, disturbances, dissolutions - of the
collapse of the party which no executive committee, no party congress, no Second
or Third International, no Kautsky and no Lenin can now stop. The hour of the
parties has now come, as the hour of bourgeois society has come. They will still
hold out, as guilds and companies from the middle ages have held out until
today: as outlived institutions with no power to form history. A party like the
SPD, which gave up all the achievements of the November uprising without a
struggle, in part even wilfully played into the hands of the counter-revolution,
with which it is tied up and sits in governments, has lost every justification
for existence. And a party like the KPD, which is only a West European branch of
Turkestan and could not maintain itself for a couple of weeks by its own
strength without the rich subsidies from Moscow, has never had this
justification for existence. The proletariat will transcend them both,
untroubled by party discipline and the screeches of the apparatchiks, by
resolutions and congress decisions. In the hour of downfall it will rescue
itself from asphyxiation by strangling bourgeois power of organisation.

What has been said about parties, party leaders and party tactics
goes even more for the trade unions. In fact, they show us the typical
petty-bourgeois tactics of compromise all the more in that their own existence
represents a compromise between capital and labour. The trade unions have never
proclaimed the elimination of capitalism to be their goal and mission. Never
have they engaged themselves in any practical way to this end. From the
beginning the trade unions reckoned with the existence of capitalism as a given
fact. Accepting this fact, they have engaged themselves within the framework of
the capitalist economic order to fight for better wages and working conditions
for the proletariat. Not, then, for abolition of the wage system, not for a
fundamental rejection of the capitalist economy, not a struggle against the
whole. That, said the trade unions with bourgeois logic, is the business of the
political party. Therefore they declared themselves non-political; made a big
thing of their neutrality, and rejected any party obligation. Their role was
that of compromise, mediation, curing symptoms, prescribing palliatives. From
the start their whole basic attitude was not only non-political but also
non-revolutionary. They were reformist, opportunist, compromising auxiliary
organs between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The trade unions grew out of the journeyman's associations of the
old artisan guilds. They were filled with the spirit of the modern workers'
movement when capitalism, through the great crisis of the 1860s, impressed with
particular harshness on the consciousness of the proletariat the pitfalls and
horrors of its system. Under this economic pressure, which greatly swelled the
workers' movement throughout Europe, the first trade union congress was convened
by Schweitzer and Fritzche in 1868. Fritzche characterised very aptly the trade
union organisations and their duties when he explained: "Strikes are not a means
of changing the foundations of the capitalist mode of production; they are,
however, a means of furthering the class consciousness of the workers, breaking
through police domination and removing from today's society individual social
abuses of an oppressive nature, like excessively long working time and Sunday
work." In the following period the activity of the trade unions consisted in
agitating the proletariat, moving it towards co-ordination, winning it to the
idea of class struggle, protecting it against the worst rigours of capitalist
exploitation, and constantly grabbing momentary advantages whenever possible
from the ever-changing situation between labour and capital. The entrepreneur,
formerly all-powerful master of the house, soon had the strongly centralised
power of the organisation against him. And the working class, heightened in
consciousness of its value in the process of production by co-ordinated action,
and schooled from strike to strike and conflict to conflict in the development
of its fighting energy, soon constituted a factor with which capitalism had
seriously to reckon in all calculations of profit.

We can never seriously think of denying the great value the trade
unions have had for the proletariat as a means of struggle in the defence of
workers' interests; no-one will dare to belittle or dispute the extraordinary
services the trade unions have performed in advocating these interests. But all
this is today, unfortunately, testimonials and claims to fame which belong to
the past.

In the struggle between capital and labour the entrepreneurs,
too, very soon recognised the value of organisation. To be able to confront the
workers' combinations, they combined themselves into powerful associations, at
first by trade categories or branches of industry. And - as they had greater
financial resources, had the protection and favour of public officials on their
side, knew how to influence legislation and jurisdiction, and could apply the
most rigorous methods of terror, harassment and contempt to any bosses who did
not grasp their class interests quickly enough and so did not take the required
interest in the association - their organisations were soon stronger, more
effective and more powerful than those of the workers. The trade unions saw
themselves pushed from the offensive to the defensive by the employers'
associations. Struggles became more violent and bitter, were successful
increasingly seldom, usually resulted in exhausting the central funds, and so
needed more and more lengthy pauses for rest and recovery between the struggles.
Finally it was recognised that the questionable half-successes were usually
bought too dear, that the compromises (at best) resulting from the rounds of
struggle could be won more cheaply if a readiness to negotiate was shown right
from the start. So they approached further struggles with reduced demands, with
readiness to negotiate, with the intention of making a deal. Instead of
struggling openly, each side tried to out-manoeuvre the other. Offering to
negotiate was no longer considered as a fault or as weakness. They were adjusted
to compromise. As a rule, agreement - not victory - formed the conclusion of
wage movements or conflicts over hours. Thus, in time, an alteration in tactics,
in the method of struggle, came about all along the line.

The policy of signing labour contracts arose. On the basis of
agreements and conciliation, contracts were signed in which the conditions of
work were regulated in paragraphs. The contracts were binding for the whole
organisation of both sides in the branch of industry for a longer or shorter
period of time. In the form of a compromise, they represented a kind of truce
until further notice. The boss gained significant advantages through the
conclusion of labour contracts: he could make more accurate business
calculations for the duration of the contract; he could sue in a bourgeois court
for compliance with the terms of contract; could reckon with a certain stability
in his management and rate of profit; and, above all, he could concentrate his
strength in greater peace for years in order to put that much more pressure on
the work-force when the next contract was being concluded. In contrast to the
boss, the worker only got disadvantages from the labour contract: bound by the
contract for long periods, he was unable to make the most of favourable
opportunities as they arose to improve his position; his class consciousness and
will to struggle were lulled with time, and he was conditioned to inactivity; so
fell more and more into the atmosphere, fatal for the class struggle, of
"harmony between capital and labour" and "community of interests between
work-giver and work-taker"; thus succumbed completely to petty-bourgeois
hopeless opportunism, which lives from hand to mouth and makes even the most
practical reforms and "positive achievements" more dubious and worthless the
longer it goes on; and in the end becomes entirely the duped victim of a
narrow-minded, circumscribed, and often unscrupulous clique of officials and
leaders whose main interest has long since been not the good of the worker but
the securing of their administrative positions. In fact, as the policy of labour
contracts became predominant, the worker's participation in the life of the
unions grew more dormant; meetings were sparsely attended, participation in
elections fell off sharply, dues had to be collected almost by force, terror in
the factories got the upper hand along with the bureaucratisation of the
administrative apparatus - both means to maintain the existence of the
organisation, which had become an end in itself. The introduction of national
contracts for large categories of workers effected an even greater increase in
centralism and the power of officials and at the same time, too, an ever-growing
split between leaders and masses, greater alienation of the organisation from
its original character as a means of struggle, and from the objective of
struggle, and deeper degradation of the workers into insignificant, will-less
puppets, only paying dues and carrying out instructions, in the hands of the
association's bureaucracy.

Another factor was added. In order to chain the worker to the
organisation through all his interests, which derive from his permanent
situation next to the bread line, the unions developed an extensive and
complicated system of insurance, carrying out a sort of practical social policy.
Apparently for the benefit of the worker, certainly as his expense. There is
insurance against sickness, death, unemployment, moving and travelling to a new
job; a whole social welfare apparatus with little plasters and powders and all
sorts of palliatives for proletarian misery. The worker collects insurance
policy after insurance policy, pays premium after premium, develops an interest
in the liquidity of the union treasury, and waits for the opportunity to call on
its help. Instead of thinking about the great struggle, he gets lost in
calculations over pennies. He is strengthened and maintained in his
petty-bourgeois way of thinking; he gets bogged down, to the disadvantage of his
proletarian emancipation, in the constraints and narrow-mindedness of the
petty-bourgeois concept of life, which cannot give anything without asking what
is to be had in exchange; gets used to seeing the value of organisation in the
random and paltry material advantages of the moment, instead of holding his
sights on the great goal, freely willed and selflessly fought for - the
liberation of his class. In this way the class struggle character of the
organisation is systematically undermined and the class consciousness of the
proletarian irretrievably destroyed or devastated. Into the bargain the poor
devil carries on his back the costs of a system of social benefits and welfare
which basically the state should pay out of the wealth of society as a whole,
lightening the burden on the financially weak.

Thus the trade unions have become, over time, organs of
petty-bourgeois social quackery, whose value to the worker has shrunk to nothing
anyway, since under pressure of the devaluation of money and the economic
misery[17] the solvency of all welfare funds has sunk to nil. But more than
this: in logical consistency with their tendency toward community of interests
between capital and labour, the trade unions have developed into auxiliary
organs of bourgeois-capitalist economic interests, and so of exploitation and
profit-making. They have become the most loyal shield-bearers of the bourgeois
class, the most reliable protective troops for the capitalist money-bag. At the
outbreak of the war they came out in favour of the duty of national defence
without a moment's hesitation, made bourgeois war policy their own, recognised
the civil peace, subscribed to the war loan, preached the imperative of
endurance, helped to enact the law on auxiliary service, and frenziedly
suppressed every movement of sabotage or revolt in the weapons and munitions
industry. At the outbreak of the November Revolution they protected the Kaiser's
government, flung themselves against the revolutionary masses, allied themselves
with big business in a working association, let themselves be bribed with
offices, honours and incomes in industry and in the state, clubbed down all
strikes and uprisings in unity with police and military, and thus shamelessly
and brutally betrayed the vital interests of the proletariat to its sworn enemy.
In the building up of capitalism after the war, in the re-enslavement of the
masses through capital organised in trusts and connected internationally, in the
Stinnes-isation of the German economy, in the struggles over Upper Silesia[18]
and the Ruhr, in the retrenchment of the 8-hour day, the demobilisation orders,
the forced economy, in the elimination of the workers' councils, the factory
committees, control commissions, etc., during the terror against syndicalists,
unionists[19], anarchists - always and everywhere they stood ready to help at
the side of capital, as a praetorian guard ready for the lowest and most
shameful deed. Always against the interests of the proletariat, against the
progress of the revolution, the liberation and autonomy of the working class,
they used and use the far greater part of all accretions to funds to secure and
materially provide for their existence as boss-men and parasites, which - as
they well know - stands and falls with the existence of the trade union
organisation that they have falsified from a weapon for the workers into a
weapon against the workers.

Wanting to revolutionise these trade unions is a ludicrous
undertaking, because quite impossible to carry out and hopeless. This
"revolutionising" amounts to either a simple change of personnel, changing
absolutely nothing in the system but maximally extending the centre of
infection, or else it must consist in removing from the trade unions centralism,
contract-signing, the professional leadership, the insurance funds, the spirit
of compromise. ...What is left then? A hollow nothing!

As long as the trade unions still exist, they will remain what
they are: the most genuine and efficient of all the White Guards of the bosses,
to whom German capital in particular owes a greater debt of gratitude than to
all the guards of Noske and Hitler[20] put together.

Such generally harmful, counter-revolutionary institutions,
inimical to the workers, can only be destroyed, annihilated, exterminated.

The German working class, caught in the chains of its
counter-revolutionary organisations and blinded by the phraseology of the
petty-bourgeois way of thinking, has once again rescued the bourgeoisie of its
country in situations where its existence was at stake; it has brought it to
safety on its strong shoulders, out of the dangers of the World War and the
November Revolution.

Then the bourgeoisie installed itself in the saddle again, to
ride more boldly and brutally than ever over the bodies and heads of its
rescuers. Although laden with unheard-of wealth, which it looted meanwhile, it
is still gripped by anxiety and terror: it has looked death in the face and
stood close to the abyss of its destruction.

Thus the German bourgeoisie in 1924 is no longer the one it was
in 1914. For even German capitalism has become another. It has left the national
phase of its development and has entered the international phase. This change
and progression is connected with the outcome of the World War.

If the World War originated in the drive to expansion of all the
capitalist states and had the aim of placing the whole world under the
dictatorship of one of these capitalist states or combination of states, so the
result of the World War was, for the power of German capital, the miscarrying of
this plan and the painful price of renouncing for the future its independent
existence and letting itself be incorporated into the association of interests
of the conquering combine.

The forces of German capital are represented in the first place
by heavy industry. Germany is rich in coal but lacking in ore. On this account,
the daily morning and evening prayer of the Stinnes and their like was already,
decades ago: Dear God, give us a victorious war with France so that we can gain
possession of the rich ore deposits of Briey and Longuy. As, on the other side,
the French capitalists implore their Lord God, in view of the scarcity of coal
in their country, for the rich coal treasures of the Ruhr region. Ore and coal,
then, also acted in the determining role in the World War, especially in the
struggle between France and Germany -- after world domination had showed itself
to both as an illusion.

The treaty of Versailles brought the French capitalists the Saar
region; but they remained discontented, for they claim the Ruhr region as
before. The mining industry, massively strengthened in the Comité de Forges[21],
asserts that it cannot fulfil its economic task without the Ruhr, especially as
many of its plants and factories in Northern France had been destroyed by the
German warfare and rendered useless for years to come. Since 1918 it has pressed
the French government into the military invasion of the Ruhr and finally
achieved its occupation. German heavy industry was desperate. Indeed their
slogan also ran: Ore and coal belong together. But they wanted the fulfilling of
the slogan in their favour. Now that it was happening in favour of the Comité de
Forges, they summoned the German government, the German nation, the whole
seething spirit of the German people to resistance. It was useless; German heavy
industry had to surrender to French capital through treaties, for coal will
gravitate to iron, and the greater right is with the stronger.

But still another economic power stands in the wings of the world
political theatre: petroleum.

The victory of the Entente in the World War was in the last
analysis a victory of the superior war technology of America. For the first time
oil triumphed over coal for the heating of the submarines and ships, of the
aircraft, motors, tanks, etc., was accomplished with oil and by a technology
which had undergone especially high development in America and opposite which
the German technology was backward. After the ending of the World War, the most
pressing imperative for America, if it did not want to lose again the hegemony
won over world economic domains, was to bring the oil production of the world
into its hands in order to thus monopolise the guarantees of its ascendancy.

The richest oil field lie in Asia Minor (Mossul) and belong to
the zone of the English protectorate; the way to them leads over Europe.
American oil capital began very quickly to secure this path for itself. It
financed large-scale French industry, took over banks, bought up newspapers, and
won influence in the government. Starting from France it pressed on - by
courtesy of the gesture of the French statesman or the bayonet of the French
military - towards Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, as far as
Turkey. The war between Greece and Turkey, the revolution in Bulgaria, the
Lausanne talks, the Balkan incidents, the military convention between France and
the little Entente, etc., are more or less connected to the perpetual striving
of American oil capital to procure itself a large base of operations for the
confrontation which must follow sooner or later - in the interest of world
monopoly over oil - with the competitors, England and Russia. Just as the oil
trust has been at work for decades in Mexico to obtain dominion over the Mexican
oil fields through a chain of political shocks, putsches, revolts and
revolutions, so it also leaves no stone unturned in Europe in order to take
possession of the approaches to the oil districts of Asia Minor, against every
competitor and every opposition.

Germany represented the only gap in the path. As the endeavours
to detach South Germany from North Germany and bring it under French
overlordship did not lead to the goal - in spite of the enormous sums made ready
for the financing of the Bavarian fascist movement and anti-state conspiracy -
and because the interests of New York clashed here with the interests of Rome,
oil capital applied other tactics. Supported by the depreciation of money
consequent on inflation and certain stock-exchange manoeuvres, it bought up one
economic combine after another and thus gradually brought the entire power of
German capital under its control. When the Stinnes combine, for which the
proffered quota of shared profits was not high enough, offered resistance and
opposed its conversion into the mere appendage of an international community of
exploitative interests, force was resorted to. The military occupation of the
Ruhr meant the fulfilment of long-cherished wishes of oil capital just as much
as it was a deed after the heart of the French mining industrialists.

Meanwhile the German capitalist class has recognised that it too
was able to benefit considerably from its dependence on Entente and world
capital. Certainly it was pledged by treaties to high payments which would
severely curtail its rate of profit, but in return the German proletariat was
handed over to it, completely defenceless, for unrestrained exploitation. It
enjoys the advantages of tax concessions under the favour of a plutocratic
fiscal legislature; has thrown away all the burdens and fetters which, however
insignificant they might be, had been put into practice in recent years to
lessen social conflict in the interest of the proletariat; above all it is again
in full possession of the reactionary power, as in its best times under the
Wilhelmite regime. It has secured its position with the 10-hour day, starvation
wages, the gold standard swindle, martial law, and military dictatorship.

Germany has become a colony of the Entente. The German workers
are the enslaved natives. The German entrepreneurs represent the privileged
caste of slave-owners, who take so great a part in the extorted and ill-gotten
gains which they have to pay over to foreign high finance that a sumptuous
life-style is possible for them. As the economic, so also the political power
has gone over completely into the hands of big capital. The "shop stewards" and
delegates of the leading industry sit in the government, manage high public
office or hold in their hands the strings on which the current party and
government puppets hang. When in November 1923[22] the establishing of a
Directory was planned, Herr Minoux, the right hand of Stinnes, was considered
quite generally and as a matter of course (as already mentioned) as the coming
man. Whether in the end Minoux or Stresemann or Schlacht, a representative of
big capital, of the industrial and banking world, will always stand at the head
and have the reins of government in his hands. The parliament is barred from
co-determination by Enabling Acts or is faced with accomplished facts; its only
remaining value is as a decorative exhibition which is necessary to the
appearance of a republic. The preponderance of all the big decisions lies not
with it, not with the government, but with the banks and employers' combines,
the state economic council, the small circle of influential pillars of the
economy. It becomes increasingly obvious in society as a whole that as the
economic factor stands in the foreground, the political moves more and more into
the second line.

This phenomenon can perhaps be designated as an Americanisation
of politics, because it first arose in the country of the greatest lords of
capital and is typical of the way in which the trust magnates and bank
potentates are accustomed to making their politics. The undisguised domination
of the money-bag, veiled with no romance, excused by no ethic, sanctioned by no
diplomacy, justified by no parliamentary phrase - the whole direct, brutal
power-politics of the economic dictators, the Stinnes-isation of politics - that
is the characteristic sign of the last phase into which German capitalism of the
post-war period has been hurled, the phase of inter-nationality.

When in the November Revolution of 1918 the bourgeois and
counter-revolutionary character of the parties and trade unions revealed itself
in all its glory for the second time, a section of the proletarians, who were
serious about the revolution, reached consciousness. They recognised that the
proletarian struggle which plays itself out on the given basis always exhausts
itself in shifts of power; that bourgeois organisations with bourgeois tactics
of struggle, even when they have proletarians as members, necessarily end up
with a compromise with the bourgeois economic and state power; that in view of
the displacement of the main emphasis of all struggles towards the economic
side, remaining in political organisations and fighting out political struggles
from here on must lead to defeat.

Thus a section of the proletariat began to orientate itself
towards new viewpoints and finally also to organise. It was recognised that:

The proletarian revolution is completely different in character
from the bourgeois revolution.

The proletarian revolution is first and foremost an economic
affair.

The proletarian revolution can be fought out not in bourgeois but
only in proletarian organisations.

The proletarian revolution must develop its own tactics of
struggle.

The consequence of this recognition was the decisive withdrawing
from party, parliament, trade union and everything connected with them. At first
the positive outcome hovered in the air, not too clearly, and only gained form
and shape in time, in the course of many struggles and discussions. The
revolutionary trade union of the American workers, IWW, emerged as the model,
although known only to few. In addition to this, precisely in the revolutionary
period, the idea of the councils system which had played a great part in Russia,
was being eagerly discussed, and stood at the centre of all practical
suggestions for and attempts at socialisation. 'Wildcat' strikes which broke out
everywhere and were carried on against the will of the trade unions gave rise to
the election of revolutionary action committees, from which revolutionary works
councils soon followed. Finally, the movement grew, first in the Ruhr region
among the miners, into the struggle for revolutionary factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen).
These Betriebsorganisationen, combined in local groups and further united
in economic areas, their construction and completion in a united council
organisation extending over the whole state, soon became the main idea and prime
aim of a movement which flowed into the Union (Arbeiterunion) as the new
organisational vessel of the will of the revolutionary workers' struggle. Not
reasoned out in the official quarters of the leaders, not transmitted by
propaganda to the workers as a subtle invention, but grown in quite an elemental
fashion from the soil of the most vigorous and serious struggles, it soon stood
independently as the object of the most heated conflicts of opinion and debates,
in the centre of the revolutionary movement.

The Union (Arbeiterunion) movement stems from the basic
knowledge that the proletarian revolution, because it wants to see the basis of
society overturned, is in the first place an economic revolution, and that
capital's work force, whose power is anchored in the factories and works itself
out in the first place economically, must advance from the factories as
determined power.

Only in the factory is the worker of today a real proletarian,
and as such a revolutionary within the meaning of the proletarian-socialist
revolution. Outside the factory he is a petty-bourgeois, involved in a
petty-bourgeois milieu and middle-class habits of life, dominated by
petty-bourgeois ideology. He has grown up in bourgeois families, been educated
in a bourgeois school, nourished on the bourgeois spirit. Marriage is a
bourgeois penal institution. Dwelling in rented barracks is a bourgeois
arrangement. The private household of every family with its own kitchen leads to
a completely egotistic economic mode. There the husband looks after his wife,
the wife looks after her children; everyone thinks only about his interests.
Even the child in bourgeois schools is directed to knowledge influenced by the
bourgeoisie, which is tailored in accordance with bourgeois tendencies.
Everything is dealt with from the standpoint of the bourgeois-ideological
interpretation of history. Then in apprenticeship, in business, in the workshop:
again in bourgeois surroundings. What someone reads, what he has picked up in
the theatre, in the cinema and so on - everywhere, in the street, in the
guest-house, bourgeois existence comes to meet him. And all that gives rise to a
bourgeois way of thinking and feeling. Many become, as soon as they have taken
off their working clothes, bourgeois too in their behaviour. They treat wives
and children as they are treated by their bosses, demand subjection, service,
authority. When the proletariat is liberated from the bourgeoisie, women and
children will still have to be liberated from the men. This has nothing to do
with evil intent, but emerges from our bourgeois attitude, through the
environment, through the bourgeois atmosphere. Whenever the worker is seen
outside the factory, he is a petty bourgeois. In clothing, habits, life-style he
apes the bourgeois and is happy when he can not be distinguished from the
bourgeoisie. If we group the worker according to living areas and streets, with
the party and trade union membership, then we only find him as a petty
bourgeois. At best we get him along to distribute a leaflet, to a peaceful
demonstration, hardly anything more. He prefers to avoid fighting or retreats
quickly. "The leaders ought to fight," he says in his cowardice, "that's what
they're paid for."

In the factory the worker is another person. There he confronts
the capitalist face to face, feels the fist on his neck, is irritated,
embittered, hostile. If a conflict breaks out here, he cannot shirk so easily.
He is under the control of others, subject to the general influence, is carried
away with the rest and holds his own. Revolutionary disposition and
revolutionary determination coincide here.

Parties and trade unions, because they always include only the
petty bourgeois, never the conscious, real proletarians, can never - on the sole
grounds of the composition of their human resources - bring about a
revolutionary action. At best, a riot or a putsch. But then, when these
infuriated petty bourgeois, their anger bursting out, rush on to the streets to
fight, they are rounded up, crippled or stabbed by the bourgeois organism
(bosses, police, military). And the movement is lost.

Not so in the factory. In every factory there is a core of
revolutionary elements. They come from all camps and parties. Only gross
delusion can maintain that there are revolutionaries exclusively in one party or
that adherence to this party constituted the revolutionary quality. All the
revolutionaries in the factory, unencumbered by previous adherence to party or
trade union, get together and form the revolutionary factory organisation. Are
you revolutionary? Do you want to struggle? Are you abandoning party and union?
- That is enough. Whoever wants that can become a member of the revolutionary
factory organisation.

The proletarian revolution has to destroy a powerful system from
the bottom and to create something quite new on the largest scale. For this task
the forces of parties and trade unions are not adequate. Even the strongest
associations are too weak for it. The proletarian revolution can only be the
work of the whole proletarian class. All energies must be included for this.
Every individual must stand in the proper place and do his best there. This
proper place is the factory, where everyone does his duty. Here, in the factory,
all proletarian forces find their expression.

The factory organisation is, basically, absolutely nothing new.
That it grew quite naturally from the struggle is explained by the fact that, in
the development of the struggle and of labour, everything was prepared for it to
arise. It was, so to speak, at hand for a long time; capitalism itself created
it. For the sake of profit it constructed a wonderful system of organising work:
the factory, the mine, the works, the economic complex, the business district.
The workers only need to acquire revolutionary consciousness of this
organisation in order to seize it, surround it and use it to organise the
struggle. It has to create afresh no party-substitute, no trade union
competitor. It only has to take possession of the existing organisation of
labour, which serves capitalist profit goals, and place it in the service of
revolutionary aims of struggle. This happens as the workers in the factories
themselves recognise what power they have in their hands; as they take greater
pains to seize for themselves the existing organisational apparatus; and as they
finally take possession of the factories, to eradicate the bourgeois system and
put socialism in its place. The means to that is the factory organisation.

The factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) is a
federative form without centralism. All members are independent; no-one outside
the factory has a say in their factory business. In their factory organisations
(Betriebsorganisationen) the members are autonomous. No boss from the
office or a central HQ, no intellectual or professional leader can interfere in
their affairs. The factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen)
construct themselves from their own resources and settle their affairs with
their own energies and their own means. This is federalist independence.
Autonomy. The factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) is neither
party nor trade union. It has nothing to do with agitation and participation in
the unions. It is not a labour association, not a relief institution; it signs
no labour contracts and has no interest in Hapag steamers christened 'Karl
Legien'[23]. It is, then, simply a place for the preparation and stirring up of
the revolution.

If one factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) exists
near the others, then they must form links with each other. Let us assume that
in a large factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) exist in the
different sections (casting, moulding, turning, carpentry and book-keeping).
These sections together comprise the works. On questions which concern not the
individual sections but the whole, the factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen)
must work together. This happens through the factory delegates or shop stewards
who are elected on an ad hoc basis. For a discussion, a certain resolution, the
delegate receives a binding mandate from his factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation).
The delegate has only to carry out the instruction of his factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation),
and disposes of no kind of independent rights on that account. Thus the leader
is not independent of his electors like the party secretary or MP. He cannot
decide one way or another and subsequently refer back and take a vote of
confidence. He has only to carry out the will of the masses. The membership has
the right of recall at any time if the delegate is unreliable. He can then be
replaced by a better one. He is permanently in the control and power of the
masses - through him the working mass speaks.

But there can be questions which go even beyond the sphere of a
factory, perhaps affect a whole economic region. Then the delegates of the
factories of the whole economic region meet together. They too have a binding
mandate and are always recallable. Thus the structure is completed, from the
factory, through the works, the economic district, out to the entire state. This
is not a new centralism, but only the councils system constructed from below
upwards. Centralism also has, superficially, this form of organisation. But
there the command goes from above downwards. In the structure of the factory
organisation the decision goes from below upwards; it does not rest on a
leader's judgement but on the foundation of the expression of will of the
masses. The leaders do not command while the masses have to obey; rather, the
masses decide and the leaders have become executors of the masses' will. Policy
is made in the name and after the initiative of the masses. This is the
fundamentally new thing, the proletarian element.

The old parties and trade unions established their structure as
follows: a few people who considered themselves as leaders from the beginning,
arranged a congress, drew up a programme, composed a founding resolution and
gave themselves a name - then members were recruited. First the officers were
there, then the soldiers - the influencing and conferring of blessings on the
people followed from above according to the authoritarian principle.

In the structure of the factory organisation it is exactly the
other way round. First of all the masses are there, getting together, organising
and deliberating their affairs. If people are needed to carry out the decisions
taken, then delegates are chosen to whom the decision is conveyed as a binding
mandate. If the delegates meet at a conference with the delegates of other
factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen), the conference does not
have to deliberate and conclude, it has only to establish the will of the
factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) represented. The assertion
of this will is the decision. Now, it is the task of the conference to
deliberate how it will carry out the decision with greatest expediency. Thus the
delegates become executive organs discharging the will of the factory
organisations (Betriebsorganisationen). They stand last in line, not
first. For the movement goes from below upwards. The main emphasis lies in the
masses, not with the leaders.

The combining of the factory organisation in a larger and
stronger unity is called a Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion). The leadership
of the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) is formed by those at the top of
the regional organisations. In its organisational structure the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion)
is neither federalist nor centralist, but both and also neither. It lets freedom
and independence go on existing in the substructure, as guaranteed by the
federalism of the factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen), but
adds in the superstructure the unifying factor of concentration, deriving from
centralism. But as federalism is present without its weakness of fragmentation
and lack of unity, so the centralism is without the disadvantage of paralysing
and smothering individual initiative and mass will. In the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion),
then, federalism and centralism appear in a higher unity, in a synthesis.
Therein lies the great superiority of the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion)
over every other organisation. It is more complete than every merely federalist
or merely centralist association; it is both without the disadvantages of one
form or the other.

In the pre-revolutionary phase the splitting of organisations
into political and trade-union had a meaning. At that time there were indeed
pure political struggles which were to be fought out with political means, and
pure economic struggles which demanded exclusively economic means of struggle.
Since the war and the great transformation it brought about, this has altered.
Today every economic struggle, however small at first, grows in the twinkling of
an eye into a political conflict: every wage movement ends with the recognition
that the proletariat is no longer to be helped by wage increases, that rather
the setting aside of the whole wages system alone assures it rescue from
downfall. But that too is a political matter. And vice versa: every serious
political conflict immediately sets in motion the weapons of economic struggles.
Ebert and Noske, sworn enemies of the general strike - when they saw their
political system endangered by the Kapp Putsch, summoned the masses to the
general strike. The KPD, in its famous 21 points of the Heidelberg Party
Conference[24] quite decisively rejected sabotage and passive resistance as
"syndicalist and anarchist methods of struggle." But in the Ruhr struggle,
government, SPD and KPD together summoned the workers to sabotage and passive
resistance. In the revolution the actual situation demands that now this, now
that method be employed in the struggle, that methods be changed swiftly, a
combination of methods often be undertaken, etc. The revolution itself changes
its aspect continually, is now more an economic, now more a political process.
It has the highest interest in an economic-political integrated organisation,
with which it has measured up to every situation and phase of the struggle. The
Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) is such an integrated organisation.

The first Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) as an integrated
organisation originated in October 1921 following the lead of East Saxony which
had already withdrawn from the KAPD in 1920. A national conference adopted on
the suggestion of East Saxony the following founding principles of the AAUD-E
(German General Workers League - Unitary Organisation):

1. The AAUD-E is the political and economic integrated
organisation of the revolutionary proletariat.

2. The AAUD-E fights for communism, the socialisation of
production, raw materials, means and energies and of the necessary goods
produced from them. The AAUD-E wants to set planned production and distribution
in the place of the capitalist methods of today.

3. The ultimate aim of the AAUD-E is society without domination;
the way to this goal is the dictatorship of the proletariat as a class. The
dictatorship of the proletariat is the exclusive exercise of the workers' will
over the political and economic establishment of communist society by means of
the councils' organisation.

4. The immediate tasks of the AAUD-E are: (a) the smashing of the
trade unions and of the political parties, these main hindrances to the
unification of the proletarian class and the further development of the social
revolution, which can be no business of parties and trade unions. (b) The
combining of the revolutionary proletariat in the factories, the embryos of
production, the basis of the coming society. The form of all combination is the
factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation). (c) The development of the
workers' self-consciousness and sense of solidarity. (d) To prepare all the
measures that will be necessary for the political and economic construction.

5. The AAUD-E rejects all reformist, opportunist methods of
struggle; it turns its back on all participation in parliamentarism and in the
legalised works' councils, for these signify sabotage of the idea of the
councils.

6. The AAUD-E fundamentally renounces professional leadership.
So-called leaders can only be considered as traitors.

7. All functions in the AAUD-E are honorary.

8. The AAUD-E regards the liberation struggle of the proletariat
not as national but as an international matter. The AAUD-E therefore works for
the combining of the revolutionary proletariat of the world in a Councils'
International.

With this programme of guiding principles, the AAUD-E in 1921
constituted itself as an integrated organisation. After two years' development,
the Dresden local group took occasion to set down in the following programmatic
and organisational principles its insights and experiences, which it had gained
from uninterrupted struggles waged with the most extreme consistency:

The World War with its national and international effects in
political, economic and cultural spheres brought in the age of revolution at
accelerated speed.

The mounting collapse of the capitalist economy engenders as its
consequence an ever increasing impoverishment of the working class.

This mounting impoverishment, as experience shows, no longer can
be compensated through struggles for better conditions of pay or through
legislative (parliamentary) reforms. It can only be eliminated through the
elimination of the capitalist economic system itself and its replacement by the
socialist-communist economy of need. As the winning of this goal through
struggle can only be the business of the proletarian class itself, the demand
hence arises quite naturally for the proletariat to give up all reformist
methods of struggle and replace them with a resolute, revolutionary form of
struggle, also organised differently. The victory of the revolution has as its
pre-requisite the unification of the working class. Parties and trade unions,
inclined by their whole nature to reformism, have proved themselves an obstacle
to the necessary revolutionary unity. Centralist in their organisational
structure, with the particular characteristic of professional leadership, these
forms of organisation especially hinder the development of the proletariat's
self-consciousness. Therefore the problem of unity became at once a problem
about the revolutionary form of organisation.

The AAUD-E arose out of this knowledge and in accordance with the
materialist concept of history by which changing economic and social relations
necessarily imply consequent changes in organisational form.

Proceeding from the understanding that economic questions and
political questions cannot be artificially separated, the AAUD-E is neither
trade union nor party but the integrated organisation of the proletariat. In
order to bring about the unified front of the proletarian class, the Union (Arbeiterunion)
organises all the workers who profess its goal at the places of production, the
factories. All the factory organisations combine in the Union (Arbeiterunion)
on the basis of the councils' system.

The original transformation of the capitalist economy into the
socialist-communist economy has as its pre-requisite the revolutionary
expropriation of the means of production by the proletariat. The process of
transformation can only be completed through the dictatorship, that is the
exclusive expression of the will of the proletarian class. The instrument of the
transformation is the revolutionary councils' system. The councils' system,
according to which the Union (Arbeiterunion) is structured, ought to
anticipate in the present the basic traits of the future councils' system.

The factory organisation elects from itself a number of shop
delegates judged necessary according to its size and type of factory. They
embody the particular workers council, which has to regulate all matters in
agreement with the members. The leaders (workers' council) are to stand at a new
election every quarter. Re-election is permissible. Every member is eligible. If
several Union (Arbeiterunion) members are employed in one factory, they
have a duty to found a factory organisation. Individual members organise first
of all according to groups of industries or living areas, as also with relations
between small factories. Autonomous small-scale firms, as likewise do
intellectuals, organise themselves by dwelling areas. The area groups bear the
character of interim organisations insofar as every member in one has to
withdraw as soon as the conditions cited above are present for the founding of a
factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) of its own in his factory.

Every factory organisation, or dwelling area or industry group
has to send at least one shop delegate to the local Heads-of-Councils body of
the Union (Arbeiterunion). Larger factory organisations, and regional and
industry groups send several shop delegates. Their number can be regulated from
time to time according to a uniform schedule adapted to practical
considerations. All three of the above organisations together form a local
councils' group in a given place. All the local groups in a certain economic
area form together an economic district. The local groups elect from among
themselves a district economic council; for the most part it acts as an
information post for the district and is in addition executive organ for the
tasks assigned to it by the district conference. Conferences arising from
necessity are to be called by it whenever the situation at the time makes
impossible a previously customary understanding among local groups. National
conferences are to be dealt with likewise. Every local district group has the
duty of being represented at the district conference. At least once a year a
national conference has to take place at which all the economic districts, as
far as possible, must be represented. The national conference elects a national
economic council. Its character and its duties correspond to those of the
district economic council, only with the difference that its activity extends
over the whole area of the state. If necessary measures extra to its
deliberations arise in the time between national conferences and they concern
the Union (Arbeiterunion) as a whole, it must first submit them to the
general decision process. National and district conferences only have their own
right of decision insofar as general national or district questions respectively
are concerned. In particular, such decisions must not transgress against
generally acknowledged principles. By and large these conferences should serve
to exchange experiences. All the shop stewards of the individual factory
organisation (Betriebsorganisation), as of the Union (Arbeiterunion)
as a whole, are recallable at any time.

The AAUD-E fundamentally rejecting all participation in the
elections to the legal works councils' committee as a consequence also rejects
the delegation of Union (Arbeiterunion) members to this body, proceeding
from the viewpoint that activity in the legal works councils effects an
artificial masking of class oppositions.

From the recognition adduced under point 1, the AAUD-E likewise
rejects on principle propaganda and agitation for partial strikes. Since the
Union (Arbeiterunion), however, is at present not yet in the position to
influence the development of the situation in its direction, the circumstance
automatically arises that Union (Arbeiterunion) comrades will be drawn
into economic strikes with the trade union orientated workers. In such cases
Union (Arbeiterunion) comrades in work have to raise the necessary
solidarity money by means of arranged contributions. The level of the necessary
contribution for the time being is discussed and fixed in the meeting of council
leaders and is in the form of a lump sum, equal for everyone, to be collected
from every comrade and paid over to the local work committee through the head of
the factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation). It is left up to each
factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) whether it collects a fund
for such purposes or raises the contribution amongst itself from case to case.
The decisive principle must be: "Whoever gives fast gives double!" If the
necessity for solidarity to be applied arises for the whole region, the level of
the necessary regional contribution is to be calculated by the appropriate
regional body. If the application of solidarity becomes necessary throughout the
country, the corresponding national body has to undertake its regulating in the
same way.

All moneys collected are to be immediately handed over from the
local labour committee to the regional or local group involved in the strike.
The method of calculation follows from the plan that 25 comrades should support
one comrade. The support rate should amount to 60% of a general average wage,
taking into account of the fall in real wages.

Moderate or other comrades fallen into need in the struggle for
our goal have an equal right to solidarity; the level of the support rate at the
time is determined by the nearest competent body, to which the contribution is
sent.

All the money required for administration by the local, district
and national committees is to be collected by way of contributions. All
functions in the Union (Arbeiterunion) as a whole are to be performed on
an honorary basis; reimbursements are only accorded in cases involving loss of
pay, or for fares and additional expenses necessarily arising for travelling
speakers.

Membership is open to every man or woman who subscribes to the
foregoing rules and principles.

The right of exclusion only belongs to the factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation);
the eventual exclusion of a factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation),
to the local Union (Arbeiterunion). A whole local or economic district
can only be excluded by the national conference. Exclusions can only result when
transgressions against generally acknowledged principles are in question.

Against all exclusions appeal can be lodged within four weeks
with the next highest body, whose decision can be contested no further. Until
the rejection of his appeal, the appellant is still a full member of the whole
Union (Arbeiterunion) and the appropriate documents for elucidating the
circumstances may not be withheld from him.

Every comrade always has the duty to take the liveliest interest
in the question of principle, tactics and organisation of the AAUD-E; the
structural completion of the organisation and our power are thereby assured.

Factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) and Workers'
Union (Arbeiterunion) are sustained and dominated by the principle of the
councils' system.

The councils' system is the organisation of the proletariat
corresponding to the nature of the class struggle, as to the later communist
society. If Marx said that the working class could not simply take over the
government machine of the capitalist state, but must find its own form for
carrying out its revolutionary task, this problem is solved in the councils'
organisation.

The idea of councils was born in the Paris Commune. The fighters
in the Commune recognised that it was necessary to destroy resolutely the
bureaucratic military machine instead of transferring it from one hand to the
other if they wanted to reach a "real people's revolution". They replaced the
smashed state machinery with an institution of fundamentally different
character: the Commune. "The Commune," wrote Marx, "was to be not a
parliamentary but a working body, executive and legislative at the same time."
"Instead of deciding once in 3 or 6 years which member of the dominant class is
to represent or trample on the people in parliament, the general right to vote
was to serve the people constituted in communes as the individual right to vote
serves every other employer, to locate workers, foremen and book-keepers in his
business."[25] The first decree of the Commune was the suppression of the
standing army and its replacement by the armed people. Then the police, the tool
of the state government, was at once stripped of its political attributes and
converted into the responsible tool, removable at any time, of the Commune.
Likewise, the officials of all other departments of administration. From the
members of the Commune downwards, public service had to be performed for
workers' pay. The acquired entitlements and upkeep allowance of the high state
dignitaries disappeared with these dignitaries themselves. The judicial
officials lost that apparent independence; they were to be henceforth elected,
responsible and removable. The effecting of complete eligibility and
removability of all official persons, without exception, at any suitable time,
the reduction of their wages to the level of the usual workers' pay, these
simplest and most obvious democratic measures, bound up the interests of the
workers with those of the majority of the peasants and served at the same time
as a bridge linking capitalism and socialism.

The measures taken by the fighters of the Commune could not be
more than such a linking bridge because their political reorganisation of the
state lacked the appropriate economic basis.

In the Russian Revolution the link bridge became a proper
coherent structure. As early as 1905 in Petersburg, Moscow, etc., the
institution of the workers' councils existed, although it soon had to give way
to the reaction. But their image had impressed itself on the workers, and in the
March revolution of 1917 the mass of Russian workers immediately seized on the
formation of councils again, not from lack of other forms of organisation but
because the revolution had awakened in them the active need for an amalgamation
as a class. Radek wrote at that time in observing this phenomenon: "The party
can always call only upon the most skilled, lucid worker. It shows a broad path,
wide horizons, presupposes a certain level of proletarian consciousness. The
trade union appeals to the most direct needs of the mass, but it organises by
occupations, at best by branches of industry, but not as a class. In the period
of peaceful development only the front ranks of the proletariat are class
conscious. The revolution however consists in the broadest layers of the
proletariat, even those which have hitherto met politics with hostility, being
drummed out of their rest and seized by deep ferment. They wake up, want to act;
various bourgeois and socialist parties, different in the aims of their efforts
and in the path they want to take, turn to them. The working class feels
instinctively that it can triumph as a class. It seeks to organise as a class.
And this feeling, that it can only conquer as a class, that the efforts of its
opponents who group themselves around a single party cannot be victorious, is so
great that with every continuation of freedom of agitation for the party
slogans, even the most advanced sections of the proletariat, whose endeavours go
farther than the momentary wishes of their class, submit to class organisation
in the decisive days. They do it from clearer insight into the nature of the
proletarian revolution. In the peaceful epoch of the movement, the proletarian
vanguard sets itself narrowly limited political goals, to attain which the
strength of the whole class was not at all necessary. The revolution places the
question of the conquest of power on the order of the day. For that the energies
of the avant-garde are not adequate. The workers' councils thus become the
ground on which the working class unites itself."

The Russian revolutionaries, the workers and small peasants,
conquered economic and political power with the help of the councils. They took
power for themselves only, no longer shared it with any remnant of the
bourgeoisie. They divided up Russia into Districts, in which the Soviets were
elected by workers and poor peasants, first for the local areas then for the
districts; the District Soviets elected the Central Soviet for the whole state,
and the Executive Committee issued from the Congress of these Soviets. All the
members of the municipal, district and Central Soviets, just like all officials
and employees, were only elected on a short-term basis; they always remained
dependent on their electorate and were accountable to them.

In the workers' councils the workers had found their
organisation, their amalgamation on a class scale and expression of will, their
form and their essence. For the revolution as for socialist society.

Through the setting up of workers' councils, even if it could not
itself maintain them in their revolutionary form and make them effective for the
tasks of socialism, the Russian Revolution has given to the workers of the world
the example of how the revolution - as a proletarian phenomenon - will be
carried through.

With this example before it, the proletariat can prepare the
world revolution. The proletariat of the world, in order to transport themselves
- and themselves alone - to economic and political power everywhere the
proletarian revolution is starting to unroll, before, during and after the
struggles, will have to create workers' councils in municipalities, districts,
provinces, areas of country, and nations.

When the German November Rising broke out, suddenly at the centre
of all the revolutionary demands and slogans stood the watchword: All power to
the Councils!

And all at once, workers' and soldiers' councils arose.

They were certainly incomplete and often unsuitable - the German
worker confirmed here too the old lesson that the German has no great aptitude
for revolution - but they were not so bad, miscarried and disunited as the
criticism of the parties and the hostility of the counter-revolutionaries has
made out. However gross their mistakes might be, they represented a new
principle - the principle of the proletarian revolution, the principle of
socialist construction. Therein lies their significance, their world-historical
value. And on that the respect owed to them should have been based.

But the SPD, accomplices of reaction and allies of the
bourgeoisie (which latter it had already rescued with its policy of
collaboration through the dangers of the war), fell raging upon the workers'
councils. It insulted and slandered them, never tired of discrediting them by
false and exaggerated insinuations and accusations, and sabotaged them by making
the existence of the workers' councils dependent on parliamentary elections.
When these, as the result of the participation of bourgeois elements quite
unreliable or directly opposed to the revolution, turned out in a more or less
reactionary way, it let the power of the councils won in the revolution be
bestowed by majority decisions and the bureaucratic authorities on the National
Assembly. Where the revolutionary workers resisted this treacherous and
malicious procedure, the Noske guards stepped in, suppressed the workers with
armed power in sometimes embittered struggles (Bremen, Braunschweig, Leipzig,
Thuringen, the Ruhr) and violently made an end of the councils.

If these councils had not been quickly opened blooms of
revolution which fell unexpectedly into the lap of the German workers but were
basically alien to their political ideology and remained alien, if rather they
ripened organically in the consciousness generated through proletarian struggle
and had been firmly rooted forms in the places of employment, with whose
function and mode of operation the mass would have familiarised itself - they
could never have been so quickly erased and obliterated again from the image of
the German Revolution. So the German proletarian let the only gain he had won
from the November days, and from which he could have developed the beginning of
his, the proletarian revolution, be swiftly snatched away again, and crawled
back like a good party and trade union sheep into the fold of the big
hierarchical outfits. With that, the revolution was lost for him.

The struggle for councils' organisation shows three phases. The
first is the struggle for the conquest of power. Here the councils' organisation
is the progressive liberation from the chains of capitalism: above all from the
chains too of the bourgeois intellectual world. In their formation is embodied
the progressive development of self-consciousness of the proletariat; the will
to convert proletarian class consciousness into reality and also to give it
visible expression. The strength with which this councils' organisation is
fought for is, directly, the thermometer that indicates how widely the
proletariat has understood itself as a class and intends to prevail. At the same
time it is also clear that the pure fact of workers' councils being nominated
does not prove they are expressions of the new, the proletarian organisation. It
will occur in the course of development that genuine councils degenerate again,
that they congeal into a new bureaucracy. Then the struggle against them will
have to be taken up just as ruthlessly as against the capitalist organisations.
But development will not stand still, and the proletariat can and will not rest
until it has reached the dictatorship of the proletariat. With that the second
phase of councils' organisation begins. In the struggle for the communist and
therefore classless society, there is no sort of compromise between capital and
labour; the unconditional vanquishing of the exploiting class is pre-requisite
for the development of the proletarian class into the bearer of the new society.
The stage of the dictatorship, whose duration is dependent on the conduct and
lifespan of the old powers, makes the transition possible. The proletarian class
exercises dictatorship in that it controls all the political and economic
institutions of society exclusively in its interests. The instrument for this is
the councils. Only thus does the construction of the communist community become
possible. This is the third phase of the councils' system. The sword is
exchanged for the trowel. The economy is oriented and organised towards new
aspects. The legislation expresses economic and social necessities in generally
binding form. The carrying out and making valid the new laws becomes the
business of those who made them: legislative and executive coincide. The
legislating and the administering body form a unity in the name and interest of
society as a whole. The organ of this large-scale and perfected construction
activity will be the councils' system.

The councils' system is at once a negative and a positive thing.
Negative because it destroys and sets aside the old bureaucratic-centralist
organisational system, the capitalist state, the profit economy, bourgeois
ideology; and positive because it creates and forms the framework of the new
social order, the communal economy, the federation of proletarian forces for the
new cultural construction, and socialist ideology. Its element is social, not
individual; its mentality the sense of community, not egoism; its principle the
general interest, not individual well-being; its frame of reference society, not
the possessing class; its goal communism, not capitalism. The basic social
attitude of the councils and their orientation to the essence and content of the
socialist idea arise necessarily, as a matter of course: complete openness to
the public and unhindered control of all official and managerial functions,
radical elimination of all bureaucracy and professional leadership, complete
alteration of the voting system (assemblies, right of recall, binding mandate,
etc.), shifting of the main emphasis of all important decisions to the will of
the masses, construction of education on the foundation of social production,
revolutionising of the entire ideology in the direction of the socialist
principle.

The councils' organisation also implies above all new tactics.

The bourgeois revolutions were fought out on the street, on the
barricades, with military weapons and armies. But armies and military force are
bourgeois means even when they are formed by workers. The army was actually
formed by proletarians even in the bourgeois period. Even a Red Army is a
centralist-structured, authoritarian, basically bourgeois organisation of
struggle. There leaders are required with unlimited power of command, and troops
with unconditional obedience. Discipline is produced by force: few must dominate
over many. A revolution made with military, with armies, would mean:
proletarians were seeking to overcome the bourgeoisie with bourgeois means. If
this were possible, the parliamentarists would also have been right when they
took parliament for a revolutionary means. No trust in parliament, no trust in
the army. Anyway we are not bringing a bourgeois army together at all. For a
start, we have no weapons. A few machine-guns scatter all heroes with rifles and
revolvers. It is especially ludicrous to try with our human resources to take on
a bourgeois army, which, with tight centralism, rests on the slavish obedience
of the troops. For such a struggle, revolutionaries are too independent and
enlightened. The comrades no longer held down under blind discipline, they are
free people - hence, however, they are also not so useful and efficient as an
army. On bourgeois fighting ground the bourgeois are superior to us, in military
matters as at the negotiating table and in parliament. From this we learn that
we must not go to the bourgeois fighting ground but must force the bourgeoisie
to come to our ground: into the factory.

We have understood that the proletarian revolution is in the
first place an economic affair. The worker set in party ideology thinks first of
the conquest of political power. This is wrong. The conquest of political power
does not have as a direct result that economic power too falls to the victor.
The lessons of 1918 have proved this. On the other hand, neither does the
conquest of economic power make political power at once fall like a ripe fruit
into the lap. For these superstitions the Italian syndicalists have had to pay
dearly[26]. We must always keep before us the fact that political and state
power are means of securing economic interests; army, justice, constitution,
church, schools - all serve to secure capital and profit. The political
superstructure is second, the economy first. The struggle must be waged from the
economic basis. There is no particular recipe for this. But the revolutionaries
must first take possession of the factories and their functions. Control,
participation in calculations and management, right of co-determination, taking
over the factories, are according to the situation, perhaps stages which could
swiftly follow each other in revolutionary times. In connection with this, the
apparatuses of the state and local administration, of justice, police, armies,
school, etc., must be shaken not so much by the assault from outside which,
because it is experienced as alien and hostile by these apparatuses, is usually
opposed with a united resistance, as rather by the fierce unremitting struggle
within, which will spring from the growing internal struggle and be nourished by
it. This internal struggle will only be waged if councils are in existence. They
are the ferment that continually engenders the upheavals and conflicts within,
pushes them farther, stirs them constantly until the open outbreak of the
struggle follows.

Alongside there may still be street fights, armed masses may
clash and contend for predominance according to the laws and rules of bourgeois
warfare - they will not be the decisive struggles. The main emphasis of the
decision will be with the struggles in the factories. Here the masses stand on
their battleground; here they know best what's what; here they are in their
element. Here, in the end, the battles of street and barricade also find again
and again the requisite support. Here alone lies the guarantee of victory. But
only when the councils' organisations are at once economic and political
formations, not one-sidedly political, like the party, not one-sidedly economic,
like the unions (anarcho-syndicalists included), not such adulterated, dangerous
to the public, counter-revolutionary surrogates as the legal works' councils,
with which the Scheidemann clique crowned the bankruptcy of the November
Revolution.

The highest representation of the revolutionary workers'
interests is the Congress of Councils. It must emerge from the factory
organisations, be the organisational and actively functioning expression of the
workers' will. It is nonsense to think that it could be set up by a party or
trade union. Then it would always exist only as a party branch or trade union
appendage. If the KPD makes propaganda for the Congress of Councils without the
intention of giving up its own existence immediately on the meeting of the
Congress, its whole work of propaganda amounts to a swindle. It only seeks to
obtain with the Congress of Councils an effective instrument for the control of
the workers in the hands of the party leaders and to perpetuate their influence
beyond the lifespan of the party. In Moscow we see how the Congress of Councils,
by grace of the party, has become a puppet-play in the all-powerful hands of
those who hold power in the party, ascended to become state-dignitaries. Therein
lies the doom of the Russian Revolution, which long ago - not lastly on that
account - ceased to be a proletarian affair. The party must give itself up as
finished with the constitution of the Congress of Councils. Likewise the trade
union. Yes, even the Workers Union (Arbeiterunion), which is structured
on the councils principle and embodies propaganda for the councils' idea made
flesh and blood, has fulfilled its task with that. In the case where a Congress
of Councils should come about alongside the parliament before the end of the
bourgeois-capitalist period - which, of course, could only be a prefiguration of
the real Congress of Councils - the Workers' Unions (we refer explicitly to the
Union of Manual and Intellectual Workers, a foundation of the KPD; the KAPD's
Workers' Union (AAUD); the syndicalists' Free Workers' Union (FAUD), and the
German General Workers' League-Unitary Organisation (AAUD-E), as the most
consistent and unified in their programmatic and organisational constitution)
are perhaps conceivable as fractions in this Congress of Councils. In
proportion, however, as they influence and determine the effectiveness of the
Congress through their activity, as their nature overflows into the nature of
the Congress, they bring about their own end and make their existence
superfluous. For the time being, the Workers' Unions are, so to speak, keeping
the place for the councils' system. In the councils' system itself lies the
fulfilment of the organisational, administrative-technical, society-forming
ideals of the socialist epoch. With the councils' system socialism stands or
falls.

The November Revolution of 1918 was the last offshoot of the
bourgeois revolution of 1848. It brought to completion the liberal-democratic
republic which the determination and power of the German bourgeois of that time
- in the struggle against feudal ownership and princely power - had not been
able to achieve. In order to save its sinking ship (in extreme danger because of
the World War), the bourgeoisie unceremoniously threw overboard the last feudal,
monarchical, absolutist ballast which it had dragged round with it for seventy
years and which now seriously threatened to become fatal to it. With that was
created a basis for understanding and negotiation with the West-European
capitalist powers, in particular with the victorious democratic-republican
states of France and America. By giving itself a bourgeois liberal constitution
and taking the government into its own hands, the bourgeoisie made possible and
attained its new structure.

Its rescue, admittedly, as regards the concept of a capitalist
nation state, came too late. The German bourgeoisie, while it was adding the
finishing touches to its bourgeois-capitalist state and at last seeing the work
of making an independent democratic republic crowned with success, had at this
very moment to give up its economic independence and let the victorious states
dictate the degree of its political freedom. That is the tragedy of missed
opportunity and belated courage.

The German proletariat tried, to an extent, to drive the
revolution farther. From Liebknecht to Holz[27] it strained every nerve in
numerous, vigorous, indeed heroic risings to make a social revolution out of the
bourgeois revolution, to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to establish socialism.
The crowd of fighters did not lack determination and dedication. Tens of
thousands have been slain, others tens of thousands thrown into prisons and
penitentiaries, still more have gone into exile, pursued, persecuted, driven
underground and ruined. But all the struggles, all the heroism, all the
sacrifices have not led to the goal. For the German proletariat the revolution
is, for the present, lost.

It was defeated because, under the leadership of its party and
trade union apparatus, the major part of the German proletariat kept their
fighting class-brothers back - in fact stabbed them in the back. Deceived by
their petty-bourgeois ideology, prisoners of their counter-revolutionary
organisations, confused by their opportunist tactics, betrayed by their
self-seeking and demagogic leadership, they themselves had to become traitors,
saboteurs and enemies to the liberation and rising up of their class. That the
bourgeoisie looked after itself, and had recourse to cunning and violence to
save its skin, is obvious, for it was a matter of necessity in the struggle
between classes. But that the German proletariat, which was in possession of the
strongest organisations, which prided itself on being the most advanced in the
world, and which had already for a space of four years just experienced
physically the terrible consequences of bourgeois-capitalist politics, wading
through a sea of blood and tears - that this proletariat in the hour of
revolution knew nothing else to do and was able to do nothing better than to
rescue once again the bourgeoisie of its country, this bourgeoisie unparalleled
in brutality, audacity, incorrigibility and lack of culture - that is a deeply
shaming and sad indictment. An indictment which, even if not completely
justified, would make it seem quite understandable if thousands, demoralised and
despairing, throw in their hands: This nation of serfs cannot be helped!

And yet this people deserve not our contempt but our help, in its
lack of courage as in its lack of understanding. After all it is itself the
victim of a centuries-long serfdom, from which everything free and independent
was beaten and broken out of it, and of a unique gross deception which the
leaders committed against it again and again. It must now go through the
terrible school of hunger and slavery, and if under the pressure of world
capital's multiplied power of exploitation, it will have the last drops of blood
squeezed from its veins, all the bad instincts and vices of the martyred
creature will be squeezed out too; in this way the school of misery will also
yet become the school of inspiration and political awakening.

The German proletariat must finally realise that the proletarian
revolution has nothing to do with parties and trade unions, but is the work of
the whole proletarian class.

The German proletariat must finally set about gathering this
proletarian class in the places of its servitude for the task of revolution,
schooling it, organising it, setting it on the march and leading it in the
struggle.

The German proletariat must finally resolve upon slipping the
halter of its leadership and taking into its own hands the work of its
liberation, in order to complete it with its own energies and methods, on its
own initiative and under its own leadership.

World history allows us time until all forces are ripe for the
task which is set us.

Parliaments are becoming increasingly empty trappings: the
parties are collapsing, destroying one another, and losing their political
credibility: the trade unions are changing into ruins. The breakdown of this
organisational and political system all along the line is inevitable.

Proletarian and petty bourgeois strata are recognising in growing
numbers that they have become victims of the decrepit party economy, if not
victims of party-political and trade union confidence tricks and, as they still
believe deep down in the rightness and future of the socialist idea, are turning
to movements which lead them up the garden path of a liberation without
struggle, a paradise for which they need do nothing: to the anthroposophy of
Rudolf Steiner, the Free-country Free-money movement of Silvio Osell, the work
co-operatives which bowdlerise the ideas of councils, to the National Socialism
of Adolf Hitler, the band of rebels who deny every organisation, or the Serious
Bible-Searchers who hope for pie in the sky. They are all going astray: their
way is full of disappointment; it ends in nothing.

There remains solely and only the class struggle, developing on
the broadest economic basis, unleashing all proletarian energies and advancing
to the social revolution, that leads to the socialist goals. The class struggle,
in which the proletariat is at the same time leader and mass, general-staff and
army, brain and arm, idea and movement, impulse and fulfilment.

The road of the class struggle is a moment of world history. It
binds feudal past through and beyond capitalist present to the socialist future.
It leaves behind it all exploitation and domination. It leads to freedom.

[2] Bourgeois politicians involved in the unsuccessful attempt to
establish effective governments prior to the October revolution of 1917.

[3] This refers to some of the armies of the counter-revolution
in Russia in the period of `war communism'.

[4] Known throughout the workers' movement as the `butcher of the
Commune' for his leading role in the suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871.

[5] Right-wing German social-democrat who organised the
suppression of the November revolution in Germany in 1918 and of the subsequent
revolutions of early 1919 - the January riots and the `March days'.

[6] The junkers were the powerful militaristic landowning class
whose political interests and initiatives formed the backbone of German
unification in the nineteenth century.

[7] Common feudal form of small-scale land tenure based upon
reward for service.

[8] This refers to the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 by French
troops as a consequence of the default in German reperations payments. Various
reactionaries, including Schlageter who was a Freikorps member executed by the
French, organised resistance. The KPD lent its support to joint work with the
rightists under the slogan `National Bolshevism'; this party position was also
known as `the Schlageter line'. (The Freikorps were small illegal right-wing
nationalist armed groups who played an active counter-revolutionary role in
Germany after the war.)

[10] One of Germany's largest heavy industry magnates in the
Weimar period. He had large industrial interests in the Ruhr and actively
financed the Freikorps in the period under discussion. He later financed Hitler.

[12] After the Kapp Putsch (a right wing coup against the SPD
government) in April 1920, a proletarian insurrection erupted in the Ruhr and a
Red Army was formed. The KPD advocated that the workers disarm and lent its
support to the idea of an SPD-USPD coalition government. Lenin shortly was to
add his weight to such a course.

[13] Working class originated leader of the SPD and prime
minister in several Weimar governments.

[14] 'Vorwarts' was the daily newspaper of the SPD. The 8th
November 1918 was the eve of the German revolution.

[15] Leading SPD politician; with Ebert announced the founding of
the German Republic to contain the November revolution.

[16] Last cabinet before the overthrow of the Kaiser (Wilhelm) in
the November 1918 revolution.

[18] An area divided between Germany and Poland after the war,
following a plebiscite supported by the trade unions. The class-conscious miners
in the area fought against being separated from proletarian Germany.